to forget the sky
by qaftsiel
Summary: Instead of Malachi and Theo, Castiel is brought before Metatron, who has enlisted Bartholomew to 'recondition' Castiel after restoring his Grace. Neither Metatron nor Bartholomew knows as much as he should, however, and Dean Winchester becomes the witness to the consequences of their ignorance. Canon-divergent AU/slow burn Destiel. Lots of space & angels.
1. Chapter 1

Any and all worries about Ezekiel's thoughts on running headfirst into an angelic civil war fly out of Dean's mind when he kicks in Buddy Boyle's office door.

Cas lies bound to a chair straight out of dental hell, metal hardware gleaming in a sick halo around his head. Streaks of blood flow sluggishly from the places where honest-to-fuckin-God _pithing needles_ have been driven into his skull. Blue eyes are open but unseeing as Cas' lips form a steady, monotone stream of Enochian.

The suited fucker carefully adjusting one of the needles in Cas' head barely spares Dean a glance. "I wouldn't approach, if I were you," he says coolly.

The noise that escapes Dean can't be called anything but a long, low _growl._ He remembers the bite of the needle, the excruciating pressure— before Alastair had taken over with his razor, there had been some bat-faced freak with a particular fondness for them. Seeing Cas enduring the same horror sparks a vengeful, protective fury Dean didn't even know he was capable of feeling for anyone but Sammy. "I don't know who the fuck you are, pal," he snarls, drawing his angel blade and striding across the room toward Cas and the bastard torturing him, "but if you don't get those things outta him, I'm going to—"

Icy cold rests between his shoulderblades as an invisible force pins his feet to the floor just short of where Cas lies. "You're going to stand and watch like a good monkey," Metatron finishes, lightly jabbing Dean with the point of the blade. "You see, I sent Castiel down here with _explicit instructions._ Go settle down, I said to him— go start a family, have some kids, live a long, good life, and then come back to tell me the story. Of course, the first thing he does is _disobey,_ the ungrateful little bastard. Go be happy, I said, and he throws it back in my face, like I've done him this big disservice!"

Still pinned by the cold pressure of Metatron's blade, the most Dean can do is make an unimpressed face and roll his eyes. "You know, I'm pretty sure that cutting a guy's essence out of his throat is considered a 'big disservice'," he sneers.

"In most situations, I wouldn't be able to say I disagree, but he brought it on himself," Metatron replies amicably. "Naomi had the right of it, you know. If he can't learn his lesson on his own, which he very plainly can't, I may as well take matters into my own hands. Well, Bart's hands, but at my request— you get the idea. Anyway, my only recourse at this point is to perform a little reset. I figure I'll take him right back to factory settings; I could do with an obedient little chump up top." Dean suspects that, were Metatron not pinning him in place with his blade, the Scribe of Heaven would even be doing the classic dumpy-smug-villain-hand-rubbing thing. "Speaking of whom. Bart? How long now?"

A twist of a needle and the words spilling from Cas' lips go deep and sonorous, filling the room the way Dean had always imagined an angel's voice should. They change, too— the cadence of the syllables is different, something about it seeming… old, maybe. Primordial. Dean doesn't think he imagines the look of confusion on the suited dick's face. "I… think I'm close?"

Metatron sighs. "Don't hurt yourself, Bart, just get on with it."

Bartholomew draws another needle and poises it directly over the center of Cas' forehead. Dean lunges forward as he draws it back, manages to get a hand on Cas' shoulder and the other around the bastard's wrist, but the angel's strength wins out, and the needle plunges home.

Dean's cry of anger is lost in the nova blast of light and sound that follows.


	2. Chapter 2

_In the Beginning, they awakened in a crucible of immeasurable density, heat, and pressure._

 _They were the Malakhim, self-perpetuating multifractal standing waves of energy and intent, and they were myriad. Though the One never spoke, they understood— they were the children of a new Universe, and they were its curators and its students, tasked with witnessing, cataloguing, and learning all that was and would be within its bounds. So they witnessed and they recorded and they learned, exploring the new Universe with joy and vigor, for they were fulfilling their function as given by the One._

 _There came a point, however, when the density of the Universe was recognised as a hindering factor in their efforts to carry out their functions. Some of the Malakhim were hesitant to disturb the Universe as the One had created it and some were silent, but most were concerned— they were created to witness, observe, and learn, and they could not do so with the greatest efficiency if their senses were limited by the smothering density— Darkness, they had termed it— filling the Universe. A team was formed and, with time, discovered that an individual's own motion could alter the density of the Universe around them, reducing the Darkness for just a brief moment. When further testing proved that the Darkness responded better to multiple individuals working in concert, the Malakhim brought the matter to a vote, and determined that the best way to fulfill their directives would be to end the Darkness permanently._

 _And so, after calculations and analyses were completed, a second team— Lightbringers, for they would usher in the opposite of Darkness with their work— was formed, this time comprised of the most powerful and magnificent of the Malakhim. The Host, clustered tightly within the ring of the Lightbringers, gave the word, and the Lightbringers spread their wings._

...

Dean awakens to the beep of a heart monitor. Opening heavy-lidded eyes, he can just make out a blurry image on the ceiling and a masked person doing something near his face. "No, don't poke at that," says the person through his mask, and moves Dean's hand away from his face. Dean isn't sure what he's not supposed to poke at, but he complies. He stares up at the thing on the ceiling— it's some sort of painting, the one with the lady in the gold dress with all the patterns of blue, blue eyes.

It occurs to him at some point that he got hurt somehow, and that Sam may have been present at the same time. "S'my?" he rasps. He doesn't have the energy to tilt his head to look around. "S'mmy." He remembers light, and sound, and burning, but he doesn't remember if Sam was there. He's gotta keep Sammy safe, or at least make sure that he's being seen to. "Gotta… fn Sammy."

Dark brown eyes flick upwards for a moment. "Sam is waiting for you outside," says the masked figure, dabbing gently at Dean's numbed cheek. Dean heaves an internal sigh of relief. "Do you know where you are, Dean?"

He still feels fuzzy around the edges, but his brain's getting with the program. Masked people and heart monitors mean one thing. "Hosp'tal," he rasps.

"That's right," the masked figure confirms. He smooths something white over Dean's cheek. "I'm Doctor Boeglin, Dean. Do you remember what day it is?"

Dean almost never knows the date unless it's relevant to a hunt; he does, however, think he remembers the day. "Saturday. I was… I…" He was hunting, he remembers that much, but what had he…?

Blue, he thinks, and then— "Cas. Doc, where's Cas?" He's frantic, trying to haul himself out of the bed. Cas needs him. Cas was hurt, there was metal, and that fucker Metatron, and—

Doctor… bagel? Bagel. Doctor Bagel's hands are gentle but unyielding as he presses Dean back into the bed. "Dean. Dean, I need you to calm down. I don't know how, Dean, but there weren't any deaths after the accident— if Cas was there, she's right here in the hospital and she's alive, Dean."

"He," Dean corrects automatically, and allows himself to be quelled. The flurry of activity has left him tired. "He's… he's m' friend, Doc. You gotta help him."

Doctor Bagel nods once, solemn. "I'll do my best, Dean."

They run through the usual battery of questions once Dean has a moment to gather his thoughts, and Doctor Bagel's conversational patter gives Dean a better idea of what went down at Boyle Ministries. Whatever that explosion of light had been, it hadn't left much more than a twisted wreck of the offices— how anyone had survived, never mind _everyone_ , was baffling the authorities. For lack of a better explanation, they were calling the event a gas explosion and the survival rate a miracle. Dean, apparently, had been one of the more severely injured, having suffered burns all the way up his right arm and parts of his face (said facial burns, apparently, were what he had been instructed not to poke at). The rest of the survivors, mostly visitors and Boyle's employees, had escaped with scrapes, bruises, and a few concussions.

Sam is permitted into the room after Doctor Bagel determines that Dean is stable enough for visitors. "Jesus, Dean," he groans, sinking down into the chair that the doctor had just vacated. "What the hell were you doing, man?"

Honestly, Dean doesn't remember exactly why he'd felt the need to track down that Bartholomew guy. He remembers Cas mentioning the dude once or twice, but the whole tracking thing had just been… well, an impulse. "Wanted to follow a lead," he says, because it's true, "so I did. I got there, and then… Sammy, it was that Megatron fucker and some other dude, and they had all these… these _needles_ and shit in Cas' head. I guess the dude did something wrong, because someone's Grace went nuclear and that's all I remember." He very stubbornly refuses to acknowledge that the one going nuclear could well have been Cas.

Sam looks troubled. "What would they want with Cas, though? Didn't Metatron already take his Grace away?"

"Said he wanted to do a 'hard reset' or something," Dean replies, clenching his jaw. "I think it's the same thing that Naomi bitch did to him." He ignores his brother's concerned look as he fumes. He still gets nauseous thinking about what Naomi did to Cas. Seeing his friend, badass Angel of the Lord, cowering and whimpering in a corner, clutching at his blade like a safety blanket instead of a weapon… it was _wrong_. He'd sworn to himself that he'd never let that happen to Cas again, but here they were, and he couldn't even manage to keep track of his friend, never mind stop it happening. It made him _furious_ ; furious at Metatron and Bartholomew for being sick enough to do this to their own brother, furious at the other angels for letting that sort of thing happen like it was _okay_ to use torture as a matter of course. Worst of all, it made him furious at _himself,_ because he was a fuck-up and a useless friend, and now Cas was hurt because Dean was too busy kissing up to some dick angel who might not even be living up to his promise to heal Sam. If he'd never asked Cas to leave, this never would have happened.

"How long are they keeping you?" Sam asks after a long silence.

Dean shrugs. "Doc says a night." He's not going to fight the guy on it; he's got a pounding headache, feels like refried, angry shit, and, if the suspiciously not-painful-enough sensation he's getting from under the bandages on his hand and arm is any indicator, he isn't in _any_ condition to pull a trigger, never mind hunt down and tear apart a couple of winged megadicks. At the very least, he can get some rest and hit the road in the morning. "Get him to bring me something for my head, would you?"

Pointedly, Sam waggles the call button before handing it to Dean. "Listen, dude. It's almost nine, so I'm gonna go get dinner and a motel." He rests a hand on Dean's shoulder and squeezes. "I'm glad you're all right, jerk."

"Glad to be all right, bitch," Dean responds easily. "I'll be better, though, when we find Cas and gank Megatron and his patsy."

Sam laughs and flicks the light switch. "Get some sleep, Dean."

Dean sinks into the pillows and gets as comfortable as he can. Before he lets himself drift, though, he takes a deep breath. "Hope you got your ears on, Castiel. I dunno where you are, buddy, but me and Sammy are gonna find you, and I'm gonna find a way so we can all go home, okay? I was wrong to kick you out, man, you've done too much. Just… hang in there.

"We'll get you home, dude. I promise."


	3. Chapter 3

_The first lesson taught to the Malakhim in the new Universe was one of darkness and light._

 _In spreading their wings to break the smothering grip of the thing they had called Darkness, the Lightbringers tore back the veil on the blossoming Universe. Instead of being reflected and absorbed instantly, light began to travel through the Universe, and the Malakhim, great and glorious though they were, learned true Darkness. Out and out and out the Host's magnificent light travelled, yet there was no far shore or even an island for it to fall upon. They were utterly alone._

 _For a long time, the Malakhim remained clustered, struggling to find their bearings in that deep, seemingly endless night. They stretched as far as they could, linked only by the very tips of their wings, yet their questing touches never felt anything but the failing warmth of the dissipating Darkness. They gazed and gazed outward into the abyss, yet their searching was met with a nothingness so profound it seemed almost aware._

 _Then, when the Malakhim were beginning to believe that they had fatally erred in lifting the old Darkness, when all sense of time had long since become meaningless in the interminable nothing, there came a glow. Faint and diffuse at first, it hung there in the abyss, singular and hypnotic in its luminosity._

 _It did not end there. The glow changed, slowly drawing wisps of the abyss inward, flattening them into a spiralling disk around itself. The Host watched, rapt— what was this glowing thing, that seemed to shape and devour shreds of the void itself? It was then, as if sensing the awestruck gaze of the entire Host, that the glow burst. Pure and blue and radiant, the light of the newborn sun simultaneously illuminated and blasted away the whirling clouds surrounding it, resolving into a blazing, haloed pinprick of light bright enough to rival even the Lightbringers._

 _That first sun proved the emissary of a new age. No sooner than the Host had begun to celebrate the arrival of something, a second glow appeared and ignited, followed quickly by a third, a tenth, a thousandth. In what seemed like mere moments after such a long time of darkness, a myriad of glorious suns traced out sparkling, gossamer filaments across the Universe._

 _Delight, however, swiftly turned to bewilderment. The suns were distant— when the Malakhim again stretched out wingtip to wingtip, the suns seemed no closer than they had been before. When they gazed out, now aided by the light of the suns, there remained no far shore, no border delineating the breadth of the Universe they had been assigned to catalogue and learn from. The Malakhim were at a loss. How were they to fulfill their function in so vast a Universe? How could one Host, however multitudinous, possibly attend to every sun with any sort of efficiency?_

 _After some deliberation, the Malakhim could only conceive of one truly effective plan, and so the great Host became legion. One by one, clusters of Malakhim broke off and embarked on their missions, plunging through the cold night for the distant lights of their chosen suns._

...

The lights flick on; groaning, Dean squints against the glare and aims an irritable glance at the nurse, an older man with salt-and-pepper hair. To his credit, the nurse has the good sense to look somewhat apologetic as he moves to check over the machines around Dean. "Good to see you awake," he says. "I'll be in every two hours; it's protocol with concussions."

"Yeah, cool," Dean responds, preoccupied. He'd just happened to glance upward and had noticed that the pattern of eyes in the lady's dress had changed. It's all black, white, brown and gold, now, which can't be right— hadn't it been blue, last night? "Dude. You change that picture or something?"

The nurse looks up at the picture on the ceiling. "No…? That's been up there for years." Brow furrowed, he gets out his penlight and checks Dean's pupils. "How's your vision?"

"Uh, normal?" Dean offers, and sits through another round of Concussion Quiz. Except for the headache, he passes with flying colors. "Sorry, dude. Guess it just looks different in this light." Thinking of the blue eyes he'd seen in the woman's dress, he's reminded that Cas still hasn't been located. "You're probably working a lot of the accident cases right?" he asks. "My friend, Cas, was there too. Nerdy accountant type, messy dark hair, blue eyes, talks like he gargles gravel?"

The nurse thinks for a moment, then shakes his head. "There's one man with dark hair and blue eyes, but he's… well, not very nerdy— I take it your friend wouldn't be a Blackhawks fan?"

Despite his mounting worry, Dean huffs out a laugh. "He wouldn't have the first clue- he's not really a sports guy. I… maybe he was, uh, further away than I was, and didn't get hurt so badly." If only that could be the reality of the situation, Dean thinks unhappily. More than likely, Cas is wherever Metatron or Bartholomew are. _If_ he's alive. Dean very forcefully does not allow himself to contemplate that possibility because it _isn't_ a possibility. Cas can't be dead, because Dean won't let him be dead. Not again, not this time. Cas survived, somehow.

The nurse gives Dean a sad smile. "I'm sorry I couldn't help," he says, tucking away the penlight and leaning down to add to Dean's chart. Dean's totally ready to roll over and go back to sleep, but as the nurse stands, a flash of blue catches his attention. On the nurse's ID card, the photograph's eyes are blue— too blue, in fact, compared to the rest of the image.

Dean glances up just before the nurse turns to leave.

The man's eyes are grey.

...

Between the nurse returning every two hours and the creepy eyes thing (even the TV isn't safe any more), Dean doesn't sleep easily that night. When Sam finally returns at around nine, Dean is exhausted, spooked, and desperately wishing for a bottle of Jack. "Thank fuck. Okay, first— any word from Cas? Two— tell me you've got an EMF meter, because I swear to Bonham that there's something in this room."

Taken aback by Dean's tone, Sam does his concerned puppy face. "Nothing from Cas, and, uh, no, I don't?" He rolls his eyes when Dean makes an offended noise. "Dude, you're _recovering_ in a _hospital_ , why would I have that with me?" He moves through the room with a new wariness, however, which mollifies Dean somewhat. When Ezekiel doesn't show up in the pause that Dean intentionally lets drag on, he takes it as an all-clear- the guy might be a creeper, but he's been good about keeping Sam safe.

Dean pastes on a smile when Sam sits in the chair by the bed. "Just… tell me what happened, and we'll go from there, okay?" Sam says.

Dean lifts a hand, pointing up at the painting on the ceiling. "It's… it's weird, okay, but do you see that?"

Sam's still doing the face when he looks up. "It's a Klimt."

"A what?"

"Klimt, as in Gustav Klimt, he was an Austrian painter. That's the portrait of—" At Dean's blank look, Sam sighs and shakes his head. "Never mind. What about it, Dean?"

Dean keeps pointing upward, because the eyes in the lady's dress had turned blue again sometime just after the last nurse's visit but just before Sam showed up. "The eyes, man. In her dress. When I first woke up last night, they were all this crazy blue colour, just like now, but when the nurse wakes me up a couple hours later, they're… not. Then I look down at his ID tag, and his picture's got the _same kind of blue eyes_. TV's been doing it all night, too. Blue eyes, everywhere, and it's seriously starting to freak me out."

Sam is not responding the way he should be. Instead of nodding along because Dean is completely right about this, he's looking at Dean like he's started speaking in tongues or something. "Dean… dude, I'm not saying you're seeing things, but… the eyes in her dress aren't blue."

Dean snaps his gaze upward. The eyes are black and white and brown again. "What the…"

A knock sounds at the door to Dean's hospital room. "It okay if I come in?" Doctor Bagel asks, glancing between Dean and Sam curiously. He has a rolling table with gauze and burn cream, so Dean bottles up his confusion and puts on his Nice Normal Patient pants. His smile is enough for the doctor to continue into the room. "I have good news for you, Dean," he says, settling into the chair Sam's just vacated. Dean offers him his bandaged arm. "Everything's looking good on your chart, so I feel pretty safe discharging you to your brother's care today. I'm going to change your bandaging, and then I have a few prescriptions for antibiotics— Sam, I want you to watch me change these, just so you know what to do."

Dean and Sam share a knowing look over the doctor's head as he bends to begin unwrapping Dean's arm. Neither of them are strangers to caring for burns, though they don't tend to suffer those quite as often as gashes or broken bones. "Better pay attention, then, Sammy," Dean teases. Sam rolls his eyes.

As the gauze comes away, Dean watches curiously. Wrapped up as his arm was, he must have had some nasty burns, but he didn't know much beyond the fact that they weren't severe enough to merit surgery. He hopes he won't be wrapped up too long— he has an angel to bring home, after all, and he'll need his arm for that. Cas must have survived, after all. He'd been human once, and that's made him sturdier, because he has a soul. Dean's gonna need his arm, then, because there's no way Cas isn't under guard, not with both Metadouche and Bartholomew holding him prisoner like they so obviously are.

"Oh," says Doctor Bagel, jerking Dean out of his thoughts. "Wow." He's peeled away the layer of gauze covering Dean's skin, exposing it to the air and their sight. Instead of the usual big, red, blistery, peely patch, though, there's… well, Dean doesn't know what they are. Intricate crimson lines curl over the back of his hand and up his arm, forking off like the branches of a tree. They cover his entire forearm, most of his bicep, and continue up his deltoid and around to his shoulderblade; he doesn't have a mirror, but he suspects they extend right up his neck and onto the part of his right cheek that's been bandaged. Along the thick 'branches' and at the places where they fork, there's some blistering and peeling, as if whatever caused the marks was hottest at those points, but that's it. The rest of his skin is just rosy, like a mild sunburn.

"What the _fuck_?" says Dean. Sam just stares.

Doctor Bagel nods on autopilot. "That's… not right?" He ghosts fingertips just over Dean's skin— except for the blistered spots, the touch only feels like poking at a limb that's fallen asleep. "The blistering's just... gone?" Perplexed, the doctor looks Dean's arm over very carefully, gently feeling at the markings, the peeling spots, and the blisters with gloved fingers. He seems just as confused by Dean's lack of reaction as he does by what he's seeing. "These weren't visible when you first came in." Visibly flummoxed but resigned to the results of his examination, he carefully begins the process of re-applying dressings to Dean's arm. "I'm dressing these anyway. Yep. I'm wrapping them, because it's better to be safe." He shakes his head. "These have been the weirdest cases of my career. Nearly a dozen people caught at the epicenter of a gas explosion, only one person in the ICU and only briefly, and now this?"

"Do you know what they are?" Sam asks, leaning closer to examine the lines that haven't been covered yet.

The doctor holds Dean's arm up again. "Lichtenberg figures," he says. "They're the tracks of electricity as it moves through an insulator. They're not usually so extensive, though— at least, not on living people, and usually more, uh, charred. I've never seen them like this." He looks up and meets Dean's eyes, solemn. "Something very weird is happening here, Dean. I don't know how you've healed so fast- I _saw_ those burns yesterday, and you were just barely in the good half of second degree. Actually, I have no idea how you're _alive_. I mean, I'm glad you're alive, but… I _really_ don't know how."

At a loss for words at that pronouncement, Dean and Sam sit in silence as Doctor Bagel works on, hands as steady as his blue-eyed gaze.

...

...

AN: Hello, all! I realised I'd forgot to cross-post this here. Next update is on the eighth, and then every two weeks thereafter. Hope you enjoy!


	4. Chapter 4

Hello again. It's been a strange two weeks at work, but the confusion and technology failures have worked out well, at least with regards to this story and a Sherlockian article I've been working on getting into shape for publication.

Oh! If you're in the Chicago area and enjoy live Celtic, folk, and jazz music, come on by the Celtic Knot Pub in Evanston- I'll be performing with a local musical group on the 18th and every other Tuesday thereafter. The fish and chips are to die for, too, which is never a bad thing.

Anyway, on to the chapter; I hope you enjoy!

.***.

 _The Malakhim were not alone._

 _It moved with them in the space between the stars— or, perhaps, it_ ** _was_** _the space between the stars, and they were the ones moving through_ ** _it_** _. The Malakhim, for all their powers of observation, could never tell; all they knew was the way the Universe shivered and rippled strangely in its wake, starlight skittering along vast, shadowy fronts that were at once distantly familiar and terribly, incomprehensibly alien._

 _Silent and unwavering, it was there, all throughout their long, cold journey. When the Hosts realized how truly immense the space between the suns was, the thing Between was there, and offered no reassurance. When the Hosts had to huddle close, flying wings intertwined in a desperate bid to preserve heat and energy, it was there, and offered no warmth. When the Hosts at long last began to arrive at their stars, the thing Between was still waiting there, just beyond the point where starlight and Malakh shone with equal ferocity, and offered no congratulations._

 _Larger Hosts were disquieted, but not threatened. They turned to their suns and resumed their duties, ignoring the thing Between entirely. They learned that, as the Universe had cooled after the Lightbringers ended the Darkness, fundamental changes in the Universe's composition had taken place, and particles with mass had condensed into being. Mass, it seemed, exerted influence on other mass, drawing it in— this, the Malakhim surmised, was the 'drawing in' of the void they had observed with the pre-star glows. More observation confirmed the hypothesis, and it was learned that, as matter was brought together by this force of coalescence, it grew steadily hotter and more dense, and began to glow under its own heat. There was a threshold, though, where the matter was_ ** _so_** _dense and_ ** _so_** _hot that it began to fuse into a heavier form of matter, releasing spectacular amounts of light energy in the process that countered and then balanced the coalescent force. That threshold of burning being crossed had produced the 'burst' they had observed with the birth of the suns, and the brilliant, pure light of the stars was fuelled by the ongoing fusion at their cores._

 _Smaller Hosts came to those discoveries and conclusions, also, but they were not so phlegmatic about the thing Between. They watched the eerie ripples, glints, and shudders of the Universe as it moved, wary and distrusting, for in their observations of it, they could never discern its dimensions or its motivations. Its passivity was the sole reason that they were tolerant of (if not comfortable with) its presence; it never interfered with or measurably hampered their work, so there was no reason to expend energy trying to shoo it away._

 _For the Lightbringer of the smallest of the Hosts, however, the thing Between's passivity was not enough._

 _.***._

"Been haven' the weirdest dreams, Sammy," Dean says as he stretches just outside a gas station in some tiny Kansas town. There's a persistent ache in the back of his right shoulder that's only getting worse as the drive drags on.

Sam looks up from the pump with a raised eyebrow. "Weirder than seeing blue eyes on a painting?"

Dean rolls his eyes, still rubbing gingerly at his shoulder. "I know, dude, I know, but just listen— it's like, the beginning of the Universe or something, man. At first it was all this… I dunno, soup. Really thick, hot soup, and then there were these people living in the soup, and— dude, what?"

The concerned puppy face has given way to Bitchface Number Thirty-Four: ' _What The Fuck Are You Smoking, Dean_ '. Sam finishes topping off the Impala's tank, holsters the nozzle, and pays before cornering Dean by her trunk. "Dude. Did you take something from the hospital? Are you still seeing things?" Dean swats at the hand that comes up to test his forehead and ends up having to duck to avoid it; he keeps forgetting how sturdy Sammy really is.

"Oh my God, Samantha, they're _dreams_ , seriously, they're _supposed_ to be weird, okay?" He straightens his flannel and checks his hair, shooting his brother a wounded glare. "Anyway, I'm almost _hoping_ that redneck parade we passed up was a fuckin' hallucination, 'cause that was _way_ too many old, white, blue-eyed dudes, okay?" He shakes his head. "Since when they start running in packs like that, anyway? Shit's _creepy_."

Sam huffs out a laugh as he folds himself into the driver's side door. "Says the old, white dude."

Gingerly, Dean sinks into the passenger seat and pouts. "You're not so far behind, bitch, and you _know_ they weren't flying those flags outta 'respect for family history'."

Sam just laughs as he guides the Impala back onto the highway. "I was gonna work with the ACLU after law school, jerk. I know." Once he has Baby up to cruising speed, he relaxes. "So what about these… hot soup people?"

"It was the soup people at the _beginning_ of the _Universe_ , Sammy," corrects Dean, pushing an imaginary set of glasses up his nose. It gets the laugh he wanted. "Doesn't really matter, anyway; soup didn't last very long. The soup people couldn't see through it, so they broke it."

"Broken… soup." Right on cue, Bitchface Thirty-Four makes a repeat appearance.

Dean nods. "Yeah, man, broken soup. Like, splashed out into space— because once they broke it, they could see that that's what was there. Or, uh, what _wasn't_ there." When Sam continues to look dubious, Dean sighs. "I don't choose my dreams, man. There was soup and no one could see anything, and then they broke it, and suddenly it was _really_ dark, and it kept getting colder, and no one had any clue what they'd done or how _big_ or _small_ anything was, because there was nothing to see. They were just as freaked out as I was."

"So… soup people in a… black nothingness?" Sam asks. After a long moment, he laughs. "Man, I want whatever you're on."

The falsetto squawk of protest Dean's elbow to the side draws from Sam is almost worth the way the Impala swerves. "Wreck my baby and I'll drag your giraffe ass outta Heaven myself, bitch," he scolds, barely dodging Sam's retaliatory swat. "Besides, it gets weirder— it's _nerdy_ soup people in _space_. They were supposed to study the universe or something. 'S why they broke the soup in the first place." Twisting, Dean endures the renewed ache in his back to retrieve a packet of Funyuns. When he opens it, the first one he pulls out is actually two Funyuns all stuck together— _awesome_. "So they're all freaked out 'cause everything's even darker than before and they weren't expecting that, but they've got this nerd job to do, but then the broken soup starts lighting up into stars, and then they can see, and space is _huge_. Pants-shittingly, terrifyingly _huge_."

Sam, settling for knocking Dean's mutant Funyun from his hands in revenge, snorts. "The soup turns into stars."

Dean chucks a balled-up candy wrapper at his brother, winces at the twinge in his shoulder and back the motion causes, and crunches down a handful of Funyuns before Sammy can whack them out of his hands again. "Guesh if yuh geh enough shoup bitsh… uh, get them squashed down into one place, they start fusing into one big soup chunk. Makes a lot of light— enough that it stops the rest of the soup from falling in all the way. It's… it's a star, okay?" He flaps a hand in frustration. He's seeing all this crap, and it's weird and cool as shit, but how exactly do you explain dark nothingness randomly turning into stars and soup people and what basically amounts to a friendlier version of the Nothing from that trippy-ass movie with the dragon? "Thought you'd like this kinda shit, Sammy. 'S like Harry Potter in space."

That draws a huff of breath from Sam. "It's nothing like that, but yeah, I like it. It's… interesting, actually." There's that thoughtful face again, and Dean has a strong suspicion that Sam's gonna go back to the bunker and geek out on space stuff just so he can tell Dean all the stuff he got wrong. "You'll, uh, have to tell Castiel all about it if we get him back. I bet he knows how it actually happened."

Just like that, Dean's heart seems to turn to lead in his chest at the mention of Cas. Hot lead, because thinking of Cas means thinking of Cas going nuc— no. Cas didn't go nuclear. He _didn't_. Thinking of Cas means thinking of Metatron and Bartholomew getting their dick hands on him, not him going nuclear, and Dean's going to pluck Megatron and Bartholomew like goddamn Christmas geese for daring to hurt his angel _again_ , because they obviously have him held somewhere. Probably chained up, because dicks with wings seem to like doing it old-school. They've got him chained and warded, and that's why he's not responding to Dean's prayers. Mind set, Dean flexes his hands in anticipation and welcomes the tingling burn that zings up his right arm. "Screw that 'if' shit. We're gonna get him home and safe, Sammy. I don't care who I have to go through— we're getting him home." He aims the thought at Cas, too, wherever he is. He's not dead, and Dean's gonna bring him home. That's all there is to it.

.***.

Seated on the bed because the chair at the desk is hell on his back, Dean has to go through some nine or ten of the Men of Letters' books on angels before he finds anything about those freaky-ass needles, and even then, it's not giving him any ideas on how being subjected to them again is going to affect Cas' ability to recover (because he's out there, probably hurt, but out there, _not dead not dead not—_ ). Dean has no idea how he broke through the brainwashing last time, but he isn't counting on being lucky enough for that to happen again— chances are, he'll probably have to teach Cas how to be a person again from the ground up.

Even if Cas doesn't remember him, though, he'll do it. Cas is out there, not dead, and he's worth the effort.

The knock at his bedroom door isn't exactly welcome when he has so much research still to do. He forgets to be annoyed, however, when he looks up and sees Sam's 'Found Something Big' face firmly in place and his laptop under one arm. "Sammy? What's up?"

Sam pulls out the chair from Dean's desk and seats himself, opening the laptop. "Describe the soup again," he says without preamble.

Dean knows better than to question when Sammy busts out Attorney Mode over something. "Uh… hot. Really, really fuckin hot, and thick— like, solid-thick."

Sam types as Dean talks. "And it… breaks?"

"The soup-people do the breaking 'cause they couldn't see through it, but yeah, it… uh, breaks up and splashes away, and then it's just dark."

"You said there were stars?"

Dean shakes his head. "Yeah, but not right away. Took a long time for things to make clouds and fall together."

"And those stars were blue?"

Dean nods. "Huge and blue. I remember that— they're _big_. Big and… and pure, I think, and really really blue." He watches Sam continue to type with a furrowed brow. Once he's pretty sure Sammy's done with his line of questioning, he figures it's okay to ask one of his own. "Dude, what's this about?"

"I was thinking about what you said earlier," Sam says, still focused on the laptop screen. "What you described sounded a lot like the way stars form. Exactly like it, in fact."

Dean gives Sam the side-eye. "Sammy, hate to break it to you, but stars ain't soup."

Sam rolls his eyes. "I'm aware of that, Dean. Just… keep listening. I did more research, and it turns out that you were right about the Universe, too. Best as scientists can tell, it started out extremely small, dense, and hot. There is a lot of physics involved in the process, but at some point the universe started expanding, until it reached a point where it became _transparent to light_."

 _That_ gets Dean's attention. "They could see because the soup broke," he says.

"Exactly. Also significant— stars didn't form immediately after that. For a while, the universe just got bigger and colder. Hydrogen didn't even form right away, but once it did, clouds of it started collapsing into stars— huge ones, as you said. Astronomers say that they were probably bigger than almost any star in existence today. Dean, the bigger a star is, the hotter it burns, and the hotter it burns—"

"— the bluer it is," Dean finishes.

Sam nods. "Did you know any of this beforehand?"

Dean shakes his head. He likes science fiction with aliens and spaceships, but he's never had the time or money for a class or a textbook on astronomy.

"Dean," Sam says with a strange, blue glint to his eyes and a tilt of the head; very abruptly, Dean realizes that _he hasn't been talking to Sam._ "Whatever happened at Boyle Ministries… I suspect it left more than just those marks."

Before Dean can protest, Ezekiel lifts his hand, index and middle finger outstretched.

.***.

Oh dear. I forgot this one ended on something of a cliffhanger.

Please don't kill me.

Or, I suppose you could, just don't do it until the Chelsea match is over. Football is important.


	5. Chapter 5

Hello again, everyone.

Life is madness on my end. Work picked up with a vengeance, a mild concussion brought with it severe post-concussion syndrome, and a vocal gig last night resulted in a standing ovation (my first!) for my rendition of 'Brother, Can You Spare a Dime'. I suppose I can say with some sincerity that I'm not very bored any more. Nonetheless, I'm very glad I have a buffer of finished work.

I want to thank you for reading, extend pie and gratitude to everyone who has left kudos and/or bookmarks, and I sincerely hope you're enjoying the story so far. Please feel free to comment, especially if you spot typos- my proofreading hasn't been quite as strong since the head injury last weekend.

.***.

 _The death of the first sun taught the Malakhim the most final of lessons._

 _They had been aware that something was changing within their suns— one could not fail to observe when a sun grew to dozens or even hundreds of times its former size, nor could one miss the way its light went from brilliant blue to a glowering, sullen red. They understood that it was something to do with the fuel— that, as the spent fuel at the sun's heart was re-ignited and fused with itself again into a still-heavier matter, the light it gave off was less and less with each successive burn even as more of the fuel was required to sustain the burn. They had taken their data into consideration and concluded that there would be a point where the fusion process would no longer produce light. The heart of the sun, they had predicted, would shrink and cool even as the winds of light still caught within its body carried away its bloated shell._

 _They had not been wrong— there was indeed a point when fusion ceased to release energy— but their failure to account for all possible behaviours_ ** _after_** _that point proved a fatal mistake._

 _Instead of simply ceasing to produce light energy, the fusion of the heaviest fuel began to_ ** _consume_** _it. This was far worse than a mere cessation of light— it was a negative, and the result was a near-instantaneous inversion of the energy flow opposing the coalescent force. Abruptly unopposed, the coalescent force's resurgence was so violent and catastrophic that the collapsing material broke all thresholds and barriers preventing it from reaching unstoppably for its former state of primeval, infinitely dense Darkness. The material of the star's body that did not fall into that infinite well of Darkness instead rebounded from its periphery with horrific force, vaporizing everything nearby in a devastating blast of light and matter. The Malakhim who had called that star home were obliterated in an instant._

 _Many hosts were lost in that time, for the dire light and information from the first death travelled at a finite speed, and so only reached the closest hosts in time for them to flee to the dark Between. As more suns met their end, others too fled, but their numbers were a mere fraction of what they had once been._

 _Once again, the Hosts were adrift in the dark; once again, the thing Between was with them, and offered no apologies for its inaction._

 _For the larger surviving Hosts, it was expected. The thing Between was passive. That was known, and had not changed. It was also known that it had no responsibility to the Malakhim, and that had not changed. If its avoidance of the stars was done with foreknowledge of the nature of their deaths, the Malakhim had failed to take its reticence as the indicator of danger it was. Their lessons were well and truly learned— the Universe could cause grievous harm and correctness of a model did not mean completeness. Given those facts, dangerous potential outcomes of novel situations would be assumed to be the most likely for the purposes of planning their actions._

 _For many members of the smaller surviving Hosts, it was expected but resented. The thing Between was passive, yes, but it must have known such an eventuality would come about, for it had long avoided the bright light of the stars. They acknowledged their failure to assign significance to the strange behavior when it was noted, and they acknowledged that it was their fear that had led them to stay so close to their suns, but they resented the thing Between's apparent willingness to simply let them die. They planned safety precautions, not because they were a logical response to an existential threat, but to spite the thing Between's callous disregard— they would survive, no matter how negligent it cared to be._

 _For the Lightbringer of the smallest Host, it was only confirmation of long-held suspicions. The advent of danger in the Universe and the thing Between's presence were indisputably proximate, and there was no evidence ruling out a causal relationship between the two. When it became clear that some of those dangers were indeed fatal, the Lightbringer's mind was set beyond dissuasion. It was right, after all— the Malakhim were great and bright and ordained by the One as the curators and observers of the Universe. That they should have to endure a life of simply waiting for the next catastrophe was unthinkable; it was an indignity as much as it was a hobbling of their ability to do their work. Moreover, if the thing Between truly had_ ** _no_** _influence over the dangers in the Universe, containing or eliminating it bore very little risk of exacerbating those dangers._

 _Prophylaxis, the Lightbringer knew, was the only way to be sure._

.***.

Dean wakes in pain— the ache in his shoulder has spread, filling his whole back with a deep throb. He's tied to a radiator in a small, dark room; the only light he can see is coming in under the door.

"You're in luck," says Metatron, and Dean just about jumps out of his own skin. The angel, seated comfortably in an armchair opposite Dean, flips on a lamp and settles with his hands folded over his gut. Sam is on his knees at the angel's feet, wrists bound by chains etched in Enochian and gagged with the sleeve of his own flannel. His eyes are wide and terrified, fixed on Dean, but it isn't Sam looking out through them. "Well. Your little friend the Prophet is in luck, at any rate."

"What the fuck are you talking about?" Dean growls. He tugs at his restraints, but between the pain in his back and the blistering still healing on his arm, he can't do very much. "What about Kevin?"

Metatron shrugs. "Oh, I was only gonna have my _idiot accomplice,_ " here he aims a sharp kick at Ezekiel-in-Sam, who flinches and whimpers, "do the wetwork for me and take that tablet out of play, but it turns out he's more scared of an old bedtime story told to frighten the fledglings than he is of _MY AUTHORITY!_ " Metatron kicks Ezekiel again, then very pointedly props his feet up on his back. "I guess there's something to be said for the whole 'if you want it done right, do it yourself' thing, am I right? Honestly."

As much as Dean distrusts Ezekiel, there's no arguing that the guy's scared shitless of _something._ "Have you looked at this guy?" he asks, accusing. "You're in charge, yeah, but I'm sorry, this whole 'big bully on the playground' shtick? _Not_ that scary, and he is fuckin' _terrified._ Maybe you should look into what he's scared of before you go laughing it off." He pulls at his restraints again and hisses when something on his back responds with sharp pain. "Why would you want Kevin dead, anyway?"

Metatron huffs. "Same reason I want you dead, really. You're a threat." He leans over to smile at Ezekiel, but the cowed angel never once looks away from Dean. The lack of response earns another kick. "I'm thinking I'll add Gadreel here to the list."

"Who? Dude, that's Ezekiel."

Metatron looks up at Dean with an expression of melodramatic surprise. "Oh! Did you not know?" He sits forward, feet dropping to the floor, and yanks Ezekiel-in-Sam's head up by his hair. "Poor little Ezekiel is _dead,_ didn't you hear?" He jerks Sam's head back and forth by his grip, but the angel in Sam is still staring at Dean, wide-eyed and shivering. " _This_ , Dean, is an angel with a long and illustrious history of _screwing the pooch_. Meet Gadreel, the schmuck who let Lucy into the Garden, who _ran away_ to escape punishment, and who _lied to you_ about who he was just so he could get his mitts on your baby brother." He grins, toothy. "This is the angel who's _still_ _scared of the boogeyman_. Can you believe it? Enormously powerful celestial being, nearly as old as the Archangels, and he's scared of the dark!"

Gadreel doesn't respond; he just shakes and stares blankly, eyes still on Dean but gaze a million miles away. Tears track down his face, spilled when Metatron had shaken him. As much as Dean wants to murder the bastard— he'd _lied,_ he'd _tricked Sam into consenting_ — the whole situation is Dean's fault as much as Gadreel's, and he can't find it in himself to hurt someone who's so plainly suffering, never mind someone who looks just like his baby brother. The memory of Castiel, huddled in his corner, clutching his blade, comes back to Dean again, and there's _really_ no way he's gonna be able to hurt the guy now. "Stop it," Dean growls. "Put him down."

Metatron narrows his eyes. After a moment of glaring at Dean, he huffs out an incredulous laugh. "Suit yourself." Gadreel-in-Sam collapses with a thump, and Metatron props his feet up on his back again. "Since I have you here, though, let's get down to brass tacks before I deal with you. Where's Castiel?"

Everything screeches to a halt in Dean's brain. "What?"

"I asked you," Metatron says slowly, as if speaking to a small child, "where is Castiel?"

Dean sits down, now just as wide eyed as not-Ezekiel. "What do you mean?"

Metatron rolls his eyes. "Sheesh, I know you get stupid about the guy, but this is ridiculous. You were _there_. Thanks to you, Bart— now there's another sorry excuse for a useful angel— flipped the wrong switch and got blown to smithereens for his trouble, everyone's favourite trench-coat-wearing angel vanished, and now I'm left without any help _or_ my Stepford angel."

 _Cas isn't dead._

It runs through Dean's brain on a loop, drowns the pain in his back. _Cas isn't dead._

For all his prayers and declarations, he'd been running with nothing, intentionally deceiving himself when he wasn't purposely _not thinking about it_. He'd been sure Cas was dead, but he hadn't been able to _face_ it— couldn't imagine a world without him, angel or human or anywhere in between. Had lived it for a year, and it'd been the worst year of his life, and he just… couldn't do that again. So he'd pretended, and prayed to an angel he'd been sure was dead, and lied and lied to himself that there was hope until maybe someday he'd believe it, and he'd forget.

Somehow, though, by some sort of miracle, _Cas isn't dead._

Dean's thanking the Big Guy for that one someday.

"Huh," says Metatron. "Guess you didn't know." He looks around, closes his eyes for a moment, and makes a small noise of bafflement. "Not here. Weird. He's all fired up again and his pet human's in trouble; he _should_ be here. _Cas—"_

The ground gives a mighty shudder, and then there's a sudden flurry of frantic motion by Metatron's feet— Gadreel has a hand free, and he's pulling at the chains and reaching for Dean, and—

"Sammy?" Dean gasps, because it's _Sam_ , not Gadreel, and Sam's just snapped the ropes tying him to the radiator like threads.

"I don't have _time,_ Dean, someone just blew the Gates wide open, and Gadreel's gonna _freak_ when he realizes I've taken you, but we have to _go,_ it's not _safe—"_ and then Sam's huge arm wraps around him like a steel band, and the world turns itself inside out.

.***.

Sam's prediction isn't far off the mark, as it turns out, but at least Gadreel doesn't decide to like, _kill_ him or something. Instead, the world rights itself violently, air rushes around him, and then Dean lands _hard_ on dry, sandy dirt _,_ sliding to a halt with a pained groan.

Okay. So it _could have_ killed him, but 'chance of death' was a little nicer than 'totally dead'.

Dean allows himself a moment to remember how to breathe properly before trying to move, but he only gets as far as rolling to his back before he's reminded that _pressure on his back is a terrible idea_. He's back on his face in the dirt again in short order, wondering if Angel Air will ever come with a parachute.

When he's pretty sure he won't pass out if he tries to sit up, he very carefully rolls onto his left side and then heaves himself upright. Hands and feet respond like they should; plenty feels like shit, but nothing feels broken, thank fuck. Brushing sand and dirt out of his hair, he gets a good look at patchy sagebrush and reddish-yellow earth, all gently lit by sodium-yellow light. Turning gingerly— his back is apparently not okay with any sort of twisting, either— he lets out a sigh of relief. There's a gas station not two hundred feet away.

The clerk, some blue-eyed ginger kid with an auto magazine, barely gives Dean a second glance when he walks in. Just to be safe, Dean moseys into one of the snack aisles, hoping to hide the fact that he doesn't have any shoes on for just a bit longer. He digs around in his pockets— his jacket and flannel are probably hanging from the headboard, where they'd been when Gadreel gave him the whammy— but he's still got his wallet and a silvered knife, so at least there's that.

He's still standing there in front of the Beer Nuts, liberally smeared with red dirt and contemplating buying some Tylenol with the wad of ones in one hand as the other rubs gingerly at his back, when he hears a familiar, reedy voice call his name.

Dean looks up and, sure enough, there's Chuck, standing in the candy section with a packet of carnival peanuts in one hand and a sixer of El Sol in the other.

.***.

Update on 9/5/15: Check out 'armistice', which is from Sam's perspective and covers the events leading up to his little Action Man scene. :)


	6. Chapter 6

Hello, all. Posting this early (well, not technically early, as it *is* Saturday here, but normally I post at noonish rather than midnight...), mostly because chapter eight is fighting me tooth and nail despite being planned out, and I would like a distraction. Please feel welcome to ask any questions in the comments, or even just say hello! I like hearing from people. :)

Oh, and a note on pronouns: The Malakhim are both sexless and genderless in their native forms. They/them/their will continue to be used to refer to multiple Malakhim, but a single Malakh will be referred to as ey/em/eir for the sake of differentiation.

Thank you for reading! I hope this is a fun read, if nothing else.

.***.

The bored kid at the counter hands Dean his change and his Tylenol. Dean hasn't even caught up with Chuck before he's popping two, praying that they'll do _something_ about his damn back.

Chuck is shutting the El Sol in the trunk of a little blue Impreza in the parking lot; he jumps when he sees Dean standing by the passenger door, doing nothing. " _Sheeesh._ Wow. I am so not used to people." He gathers himself, then swings into the driver's seat, cracking into the carnival peanuts while Dean gingerly takes his seat on the passenger side. "So. I… well, I hadn't meant to come this way, but I just had this… uh, feeling, I guess, and… here you are. What happened?"

Dean closes his eyes and tries to settle into the seat as comfortably as possible with a bad back. "Fuckin' Metatron," he groans, and then recounts the whole, ridiculous story, dreams and all, right from busting in on Bartholomew and Metatron messing with Cas' head to Sam borrowing Gadreel's powers to whisk him away from the rogue scribe.

Chuck, to his credit, doesn't say much of anything, and doesn't ask Dean about his feelings or even send any stupid mushy looks whenever he talks about Cas (and why would he? Dean's voice was totally steady through all of it. No shakes or cracking or any of that, cause he doesn't do that). He just stares ahead and drives, occasionally chewing on one of his candies; even after Dean finishes, he's still quiet, apparently deep in thought.

At length, he speaks up. "Can… uh, can I see the marks, when we make the next stop?" He glances at Dean nervously. "I know that's, um, a bit weird to ask, but I had a lot of… well, ideas about things that I couldn't find a place for in the books, and this… it sounds familiar."

Dean, in the middle of readjusting in his seat for the billionth time, just nods. "Don't see why not. Might not be too pretty, though; the Tylenol's cutting a lot of it, but I think it's gotten worse or something. Haven't been able to check." He finally gets settled and heaves a sigh. "Man, this sucks. And hey, what about you?"

"Huh? Me?"

Dean nods. "Yeah, dude. You. When Kevin woke up as a prophet, we… sorta thought you were dead. Becky said you'd broken up with her and then sorta vanished or something, and all of your books are online now?"

Chuck laughs. "Oh. That. Right. No, uh, I'm not dead. Obviously, right, because I'm sitting here, and…" He taps out a nervous tattoo on the steering wheel. "I woke up one morning and… it was gone."

"Uh… what was gone?" Dean asks.

"The prophet stuff," Chuck replies. "The visions, the weird dreams, the, uh, you know, the 'talking with God' stuff. It doesn't happen any more, except for the occasional hunch like today." He shrugs. "It freaked me out a bit, so I left."

Dean raises an eyebrow. He's hardly one to talk when it comes to skipping town, but it had seemed like Chuck had a good thing going with Becky.

Well, at least until she'd tried to witch-roofie Sam.

Okay, maybe not such a good thing going.

"Gotcha," Dean says.

Silence descends on the car awkwardly after that, but it soon becomes the comfortable quiet of a long drive. Chuck, eyes a little glazed over with the road hypnosis that's inevitable on trips like these, works through his carnival peanuts with machinelike efficiency, and Dean just stares out the window, watching mile markers slide by as they continue eastward. A southward exit for Vegas passes by; Dean can't help but smile. It'll be a good old time taking Cas to Vegas someday, especially after his reaction to the last 'den of iniquity' Dean had dragged him to.

With Chuck deep in cross-country headspace, Dean feels secure in clasping his hands together in his lap. ' _Castiel, who art somewhere, got your ears on?_ ' he thinks, willing the thoughts to reach Cas, wherever he might be. ' _It's Dean, Cas. Hope you remember me. I'm so fuckin glad you're alive, man.'_ He has to fight down a tightness in his chest after attempting to convey the depth of his relief, and then his eyes are watering or some shit, and he hopes Cas doesn't think he's actually all worked up or something, because he's totally not. Besides, there's no telling if Cas is safe or not; can't have him thinking Dean's… soft or emotional or weak or something, when it's just dust in the air. Dude's gotta focus on staying alive, not on Dean's breathing and eye problems.

Speaking of Metatron. ' _Had to hear about you still being around from Megadouche, but hey. Good news is good news. Supposedly someone's gone and busted Heaven's gates down, too, dude. Sneak up there and recharge a bit so you can kick his ass, will you?'_ He tries to picture Cas in his trench coat scruffing and drop-kicking Metatron right off of his high horse. Cloud. Whatever. It's funny in his head; hopefully that translates. ' _I ran into Chuck, by the way. We're headed east— just passed an exit for Vegas. You remember Chastity, don't you? That was one of the best nights of my fuckin life, man. If you can hear me, Cas, I wanna do that again.'_ He huffs out a laugh under his breath. ' _Maybe not the hookers, but… you and me, hangin out._

' _So yeah, dude. If you can hear me… even if you don't remember, but you're wondering who the fuck this crazy dude praying to you is, just… here,'_ he prays, and sends the mental image of the car, the road, the speedometer, and the mile marker up ahead. ' _If you get that— if you can get away from wherever you are— don't be a stranger. You got a friend here, bud, and a home, and we just wanna know you're okay.'_

Seconds tick into minutes into an hour. The sun seems to rise right out of the highway as the dusty flats slowly give way to dry, scrubby foothills.

Cas doesn't show up in the back of the car.

"Fuckin allergies," Dean grumbles through a stuffy nose, and scrubs at his wet eyes.

.***.

They finally pull over at a tiny rest stop somewhere just east of the Colorado border. Chuck staggers out of the driver's seat and squints blearily in the midday sun, running fingers through hair that looks like it hasn't seen a picture of a comb in days, never mind the real thing. "Man, I've gotta sleep. I've been driving… I don't know how long I've been driving. Is that bad?" He shakes his head. "That's gotta be bad."

Dean, recovered from his allergies now that they've gotten into the foothills of the Rockies, shrugs and promptly regrets it when his back twinges in protest. It's nowhere near as bad as it had been, though; he makes a mental note to find and thank whoever it was that invented Tylenol when he's in Heaven next (because seriously, with his life? He's going back at some point or another). "Had days like that. Not so much any more, but when me 'n Sammy were younger, man, we'd drive fifteen, twenty hours without stopping for much more than food or a piss." Not that they really _could_ stop, not with Dad pushing them on and then with seals breaking all over the place, but the point stands. "Drove straight from Chicago to San Francisco, once, just before Sammy left for Stanford. I'd never been so glad to see a shitty motel bed."

"Yeah. I know," Chuck says, quiet, and Dean remembers suddenly that he _does_ know. He's seen it all— cross-country marathons with him and Sammy in Baby's backseat, that first shift on Route 66, and even those long, lonely nights with Sammy dozing up front while Dad slept off a bender in the back seat before the next hunt.

"Huh," Dean says. "You do, don't you?" He thinks about it for a moment. A few years ago, he'd been totally weirded out by it, but after everything else that's happened, he's… almost relieved. At least Chuck won't ask questions or sit there pitying him. "You'll get used to it pretty quick. Go do your thing; I'll be back in five."

A bit of snooping around the rest stop after doing his business turns up a battered first aid kit; Dean relieves it of a strip of alcohol wipes and a roll of gauze. He rejoins Chuck by the Subaru and sits down in the open passenger side. "So the doc called 'em 'Lichtenberg figures' or something. 'S what happens when you get hit by lightning, but he says they're usually not… well, most folks just die when they're this bad."

Chuck sucks in a breath when the last layers of gauze come away from Dean's hand. "Wow."

"Yeah," Dean agrees. The rosiness to his skin is totally gone— the marks, still crimson, stand out as starkly as a fresh tattoo. The only evidence that there had been blistering at any point is a few patches of light peeling at the intersections of the branching marks. "Those are lookin' a lot better than they were yesterday." More and more healed, marked skin is revealed as he steadily unwraps the rest of the bandaging. He flexes his hand experimentally and feels… nothing. Moving his shoulder makes his back hurt again, but his arm seems to be perfectly fine. "The fuck?"

"This is exactly like I pictured it," Chuck says, leaning close to look at Dean's cheek when that bandage comes away, too. "Exactly. You said you were touching the metal of the needle when the explosion happened, right?" At Dean's nod, he continues. "Yeah, wow. This is _so_ cool to see."

"Cool for you, maybe," Dean grumbles, but lets Chuck fanboy for a bit anyway. Shutting him down'd be like kicking a puppy. "Glad it's nothing life-threatening, man, but what _is_ it? Why's it healing so fast?"

"It's where you conducted an angel," Chuck replies. "In their true forms, they're… uh, they're like… circuits. Really intricate, interlinked, multidimensional circuits, full of Grace instead of electricity, and the wires are… uh, like the lines in electromagnetic fields, but not just lines, and not electromagnetic fields, at least not intrinsically, though a field's kind of a byproduct, and I guess with all that energy, they'd have a gravitational one, too? Oh, and definitely more convoluted, and they resonate at a certain wavelength. Well, a few wavelengths, but—"

Dean blinks. He's still stuck on the first part. " _Conducted_ an angel?"

Chuck nods. "Um. Yeah. You're a vessel, so you're a conductor for angels that resonate at certain wavelengths, Michael's in particular. Thing is, every angel resonates a little differently. This… I think this was Castiel, because Bartholomew and Michael's resonances aren't anything alike. He, uh. He would have just incinerated you. Castiel and Michael, though— they're a lot alike. Harmonic, I guess."

Dean considers the marks on his arm. "So… that means what?"

"He's not a clone of Michael, so he couldn't, uh, move through you perfectly? You… uh, you weren't a perfect conductor for him, so he hit resistance, which caused heating and then burns. They've healed fast because of… um, I guess you could call it residual charge?"

It's a lot to take in. First of all, if he'd _conducted_ Cas, then that means Cas had been _in him_ , if only for a little, which is really, really weird (and kind of… _good_ , a secret, small part of him thinks, even if he's probably fucked Cas up somehow just by contact). Weirder still— intentionally or not, Cas has left behind enough Grace that it's strong enough to heal the damage he'd done. "So why's my back's killing me, if it's all healed? Why've I been having weird dreams and seeing things?" he asks. "Would the leftover stuff do that?"

Tilting his head back, Chuck thinks for a while. "Uhh, it could? I never had many ideas about side-effects of conducting. It, um. It doesn't exactly happen often, and most of the time it kills the conductor. Since there's left-behind grace, though, dreams might be pretty normal." He shrugs, then pats around for something in his pockets. "Here," he says as he produces a scrap of yellow paper and a pen. He scribbles a number down and hands it to Dean. "My number. Call me in a few days— I'll go through my old notes and see if I have anything written down that I've forgotten about." Dean tucks it away in his wallet. "Listen, um— would it be okay if I, uh, took a nap? I'm just really wiped, and—"

Dean waves a hand. "Nah, dude, it's cool. Was kinda planning to get some sleep myself." Maybe not right away, of course, not with this latest revelation to think about, but sleep is definitely going to happen sooner or later. He wiggles his toes in the footwell and fiddles with the seat until the back reclines. "'S roomy for a little foreign car."

Chuck stretches out in the reclined driver's seat and huffs out a laugh. "It's no Baby, but it gets me around."

Dean smiles. "Chuck, if there's one thing about those damn books I like, it's that."

"What?"

"Baby. Whole world knows just how awesome my girl is."

Dean doesn't need to open his eyes to know Chuck is rolling his.

 _.***._

 _Ey was not the largest or brightest of their little Host of five, but ey was not the smallest or dimmest, either. Ey did enjoy the distinction of being the best observer, able to make the novel connections between data that the others thought totally unrelated, but it ultimately meant that, with eir conveniently lower energy requirements due to eir size,_ _ **ey**_ _was the one sent out to do close observations while the others clustered right where the dimmest of their number still outshone their new sun._

 _Most of eir observations were, naturally, concerned with the second sun. Smaller and not quite as blue, it had coalesced and ignited from the blasted remains of their first sun; seeded as it was with traces of the heavier forms of matter created in the cataclysm of the first sun's death, its light lacked the first sun's purity. Ey also observed that, due to its smaller size, the new sun did not have to burn so much fuel to balance its own coalescent force. The Host would have more time before they would need to flee deeper into the abyss Between for safety._

 _Eir other observations were performed at the behest of the Lightbringer, and were concerned with the thing Between. Ey knew eir Lightbringer considered it hostile, but when it hadn't done_ _ **anything,**_ _good or bad, ey just couldn't see the rationale behind the argument or in sending em out into the cold and dark to try and observe the nearly-unobservable. The thing Between had no responsibility to the Hosts; vast as it was, ey sometimes wondered if it was even_ _ **aware**_ _of the Hosts. After all, the One had created the Malakhim with the duty to observe, understand, and care for all things great and small— it was no great leap of the imagination to surmise that the thing Between might well have been assigned a different function by the One, and thus had not noticed its diminutive fellows in the Universe. The Lightbringer's hostility seemed ill-conceived at best from that angle._

 _As for em, ey liked the thing Between. The brief glimpses ey caught reminded em that the changing Universe was immense beyond understanding, and that ey would never truly exhaust eir function as an observer of all things. Even knowing that it likely took no note of em, ey recounted and displayed eir observations and eir thoughts to it at the end of each of eir excursions into the abyss, just to share the joy that was knowing there was a whole Universe full of undiscovered things to explore. (If ey was being totally honest, ey also did it in the hopes that a pleasant parting gift would appease any annoyance the thing Between might possibly feel at eir intrusion. An apology, less for emself than for eir Lightbringer's fixation.)_

 _So ey went out and observed, and then went back to the other four and reported, and then went out again, and for a long time— long enough for the second Sun to enter the immense red phase of its life— very little about eir life with the Host changed._

 _In the aftermath, the Lightbringer would always say that it was eir expectation of no change that made the change so shocking, but ey was not convinced._

 _Returning to discover that the second smallest— not the Smallest, for ey had_ _ **helped**_ — _had been split asunder, the torn fragments of eir structures somehow twisted into a host of almost two dozen smaller,_ _ **biddable**_ _Malakhim while the largest, second-brightest had merely_ _ **looked on**_ _would never be a mere 'shock'. The Lightbringer and the Smallest— now called the Healer, for ey had apparently been the one to 'heal' the fragments of their sibling— had_ _ **destroyed**_ _one of their number, and the Largest had done nothing to stop it._

 _It was an atrocity, and though ey had come to love eir brethren as they travelled and survived together, that love could not erase the horror of the act. Ey would never quite feel safe within eir Host again._


	7. Chapter 7

_Hi, everyone. Tough week, so here's the chapter a bit (six minutes, to be precise) early. Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy._

.***.

 _.***._

 _No one questioned it when ey volunteered for long-term, solitary observations of the forming third sun._

 _It could not be said that ey had not made an honest effort, but this was a time when effort simply was not enough to solve the problem. The small Malakhim were frightened in the wake of the second sun's violent death, but every time ey tried to offer comfort, ey could not help recognising some fragment or another of eir lost sibling, and had to retreat. The small Malakhim were confused, but whenever ey tried to provide guidance, ey could not bear to teach them, for ey could not forget that their confusion stemmed from the fact that they were the irreparably broken shards of what had once been a whole._

 _So ey made eir apologies to the Largest and the Lightbringer, volunteered so ey might regain eir bearings through doing eir duty in solitude, and left._

 _Ey was grateful that the journey was a long one; the time to work through eir thoughts allowed em to focus when, upon arrival at the new sun, ey found it very much **unlike** its predecessors. It was small (in relative terms— its diameter was still over two hundred times eir fullest wingspan), for one thing. In fact, it was so small that it burned with a slow, cool, golden light, barely requiring any fuel to counteract its smaller coalescent force. If eir estimates were correct, it would burn for nearly a hundred times as long as the last sun before it entered its red phase. Unlike the second sun, which had burned with tempestuous lashes of superheated matter and brilliant flares, the new, third sun burned quietly, only flaring or ejecting matter occasionally, and never on the same scale as the old one._

 _Quiet though the new sun might have been, the cloud from which it had been born was nothing remotely resembling boring. It was so rich in the heavier materials formed by the last two suns that the stuff coalesced into a bevy of smaller spheres that remained even after the harsh wind from the new sun's ignition- four with thick, colourful shrouds of cloud (one of which was so large that ey could line up twenty of emself, wingtip to spread wingtip, and still not span its entire diameter) and several smaller ones with no clouds that hung near their sun. These smaller spheres (most with diameters just a bit larger than eir own wingspan) endured a time of near-relentless bombardment by leftover debris. On two different occasions, ey had to scramble to get out of the way of the smaller spheres- bombardment, it seemed, destabilised their orbits around the new star, and the resulting sphere-sphere collisions and mergers were truly spectacular to behold._

 _All too soon, however, the spheres had settled, clearing paths of calm through the cloud of debris for themselves. Ey almost missed the chaos and activity; it kept em distracted and productive, forestalling eir return to the Host. Ey didn't even have the diversion of 'reporting' to the thing Between— unlike its behavior around the first two suns, it did not keep its distance from this one. If it could see, it had witnessed all that had transpired just as much as ey had._

 _Options exhausted, ey reluctantly undertook the return journey, dreading what ey might discover upon eir return to the host **this** time._

 _Unexpectedly, ey found emself waiting in empty space. This **was** where the Host had been last, ey was quite sure of it, yet there was no sign of them anywhere except for a slight warming of the matter in the area. There was no trail to follow, though, as there would have been had the Host departed, so the question remained— where had they gone?_

 _It was then that the Universe rippled in a new way, and the Largest spilled sideways into view from seemingly nothing._

 **What was that?** _ey demanded of eir sibling, awed and a little frightened._ **Where were you? How did you… do whatever that was?**

 **We have learned much since you departed,** _the Largest replied, and explained the strange absence. It seemed that, in the wake of eir departure, the remaining Host had observed that the Universe seemed to be influenced by eir passage. Further studies were conducted, and it was discovered that, in the same way the Malakhim had been able to influence the Darkness, so too could they shape matter and the very Universe._ **The Lightbringer believes you were a messenger through whom the One communicated with us,** _the Largest finished._ **Messenger, come see the Haven we have wrought with your help!** _The Largest did not wait for eir response, and simply indicated that ey should follow._

 _Confused, both by the tale and the epithet, ey only just managed to mimic the peculiar, sideways twist that the Largest performed on eir first try. Ey was still more disoriented to discover that, in performing the strange twist, ey had altered something._

 _Whatever the something was that had changed, it had resulted in eir arrival in a bizarre, warped space, with the Universe clearly visible behind and something bright ahead, but closed in at the sides by weirdly curved starlight. Ey could move in any direction within the strange space, but the only movement that changed anything observably was motion toward or away from the Universe. Moving toward the Universe, ey found, reduced the distortion, as if the strange space's influence lessened with distance from the bright place. Conversely, movement toward the bright place intensified the distortion of starlight, to the point where only a tiny window of normal space remained visible in the moment just before ey emerged into the Haven._

 _Emerging into the so-called Haven, incidentally, wiped all curiosity at the effects of the strange space right out of eir mind._

 _The Haven and the Universe shared one thing, and one thing only— they were spaces in which Malakhim could move. In all other ways, they were completely dissimilar. If anything, the Haven was better compared to a Malakh, and even then it was a poor analogy. It was structured and infinite within its bounds like a Malakh, yes, but it was not a dynamic current that sang as the Malakhim did— it was silent, only reflecting back the resonances of the Malakhim already present. The Haven was also like a Malakh in that it shone brightly, but its light was as static as its course, never shifting or flowing the way the Malakhim did, or even like the the light of the stars. No matter how ey tried to focus, the rest of the Universe was never more than barely visible through the Haven's borders, and even then the view was hazy and powerfully distorted._

 _Silence, stillness, and opacity— in that strange place, eir senses had nothing to seize on but eir fellow Malakhim._

 _Perhaps that was the intent?_

 _If so, what purpose could it possibly serve?_

 _Ey felt a sudden, deep yearning for the living, changing Universe. There was something unsettling about the echoing, unchanging chamber that was so isolated from the Universe that they had been charged with observing and preserving._

 **Messenger,** _called the Largest, shaking em out of their thoughts,_ **follow. The Lightbringer would speak with you.**

 _So ey followed, but when ey and the Largest came upon the Lightbringer and the Healer, ey was surprised to see the small Malakhim clustered about them, listening raptly as the Lightbringer and the Healer recounted their duties as given to them by the One. Ey was more surprised still when, in the course of their tale, the Lightbringer and the Healer made the One sound almost like an omnipotent, omniscient Malakh. Ey had no evidence to the contrary, so ey remained silent, but as the recounting went on and it became clearer that the Lightbringer and the Healer were presenting this unsupported tale as factual truth, eir unease doubled and redoubled._

 **Surely this is a dangerous course of action,** _ey protested to the Largest._ **There is no proof. Why do they present this… version of the One as the truth?**

 _The Largest gave a neutral curl._ **The Lightbringer and the Healer have turned their studies inward— they observe the behavior of the lower Malakhim, which allows for a point of comparison by which they can come to conclusions about ourselves, the higher Malakhim.** _One of a myriad of huge, scarlet wings swung out._ **For all we know about the Universe— about suns, time, space, and matter— we know very little about ourselves. It is a void that should be filled, as we too are part of the Universe we have been assigned to understand.**

 _Ey could not argue against that final point, but there was much that simply did not sit well with em. For one thing, the small Malakhim were… well, they were definitely Malakhim, but they were not the original Malakhim. Ey was not certain that they were valid subjects for making generalizations about the way larger Malakhim thought or behaved. Moreover, as they were not larger Malakhim, was it right to hold them to the same duties?_ **It is a void to fill, yes, but is this the way to do it? Are they a valid comparison group, Largest? Is it right to give unknowns as truths? Have they been informed that some or all of what they are being told is purely speculative and potentially wrong?**

 _The Largest flicked eir wings with the beginnings of annoyance._ **You ask many questions, Messenger, and they are important to ask, but we— and they— are Malakhim. They are providing important data in an ongoing study of cognition; what does it matter whether what they are being told is proven or unproven? The duty of a Malakh is to learn or to facilitate learning, and as we higher Malakhim are bound, so too are the lower.**

 _The Messenger (for it seemed ey would be stuck with that title) curled inward with disquiet. The Largest was absolutely right. How could ey argue with the fact that the Malakhim existed to learn?_

 _But then, how could ey not be troubled while the Lightbringer and the Healer were operating from so weak an experimental design? No considerations for observer bias and influence were being taken, nor had they formed two groups of small Malakhim, one to receive their doctored tale and the other left alone to serve as a baseline. Worse still, it seemed that they were perfectly aware that they were laying a fundamentally flawed foundation of thought in the minds of the small Malakhim. Ey had to wonder— were they aware that such a foundation might not be so easily erased?_ **Why is there no comparison group? What if they cannot overcome dissonances created by this worldview they are being taught?**

 **We are the comparison group, Messenger. As for un-learning, we will learn that, too,** _said the Largest, hostility creeping into eir arrangements and tone. It was all too clear to the Messenger, seeing that hostility, that further questions would be received poorly— poorly enough, in fact, that ey might well find emself in danger from eir own siblings._

 _Ey could very well already be in danger—the Healer and the Lightbringer had gone quiet._

 _Stunned, the Messenger did something ey had never considered doing before and carefully kept eir wings and fronts arranged in confusion rather than the growing fear and betrayal ey was feeling._ **I need time to consider,** _ey said after a long moment, displaying friendly indecision._

 _The sham worked— the Largest's arrangement immediately opened and softened, pleased at eir apparent capitulation, and the Lightbringer and the Healer resumed their speech._ **We will await your return to the Host, Messenger. You will see the value in our work soon enough.** _That, more than anything, cemented the Messenger's decision in eir mind. Something was very, very wrong, and ey would need to act with great care and discretion._

 _Seeking out the oblique entryway to the 'Haven' construct took em some time, but find it ey did, and ey didn't hesitate to take it and escape to the darkness of the Universe outside. It was a strange reversal, ey thought as ey drifted, that the chasm between the stars, once so cold and frightening, had become a place of comfort._

 _Ey could not go back to the Haven, that much was certain— ey had concealed eir true emotions from the Host once, but there was no way to know if ey could maintain that indefinitely. If ey slipped, the consequences could well be grave; similarly, if ey seemed to hasty to leave on eir observations, that too could be construed as a threat. Ey would have to find a way to make eir request fit with whatever agenda the rest of the Host was pursuing, but what would be believable?_

 _The Messenger drifted for a long time, thinking, until ey caught a glimpse of an eerie ripple of starlight along a vast, alien edge._

 _Perfect._

 _It was just as ey was seeking out that sideways space once again to inform the Lightbringer and the Largest of eir departure that the Lightbringer emself slid into the universe, accompanied by a sole, small Malakh._ **I was going to come find you,** _the Messenger said after a moment of surprise from all parties._

 **Oh?** _the Lightbringer prompted, tone warm but arrangements lukewarm._

 _Careful, careful. Ey arranged eir wings and fronts just so, conveying guilelessness, a hint of confusion, and just the right amount of earnest willingness to please._ **The Largest was very thorough in answering questions, and after consideration, I see the logic of eir thinking. It seems that your work in the Haven is well in hand, however, and part of my reticence came from the sense that I might create difficulties by joining in so late in the process.**

 _The Lightbringer's attitudes were steadily relaxing._ **A reasonable concern. You have not been privy to much of it.**

 **Exactly,** _the Messenger agreed._ **I am relieved by your understanding. I was very ashamed by the idea that I might not be of use, but it occurred to me that I am well-positioned to assist with something that might be of equal importance.** _Opening two wings, ey indicated the spheres that were just barely visible as reflective specks around the third sun._ **From those spheres— those planets— I am able to observe the way the thing Between influences matter, in much the same way I am told the Host observed me.**

 _The mention of the thing Between had the Lightbringer's full attention in an instant._ **You will observe it for me? For us?**

 **Yes,** _ey confirmed, managing to translate eir intimidation into a respectable mimicry of awe at the Lightbringer's intensity._ **I will learn all I can, and I will learn about the planets, and the things on them, and how… how we might make use of them, just as you made use of the fabric of the Universe to create the Haven.** _Cringeing inwardly at eir awkwardness, ey decided to make the best of a clumsy situation and let some of eir self-deprecation show._ **I just want to be _useful_.**

 **You will be,** _the Lightbringer said with honesty._ **Go to tell the Largest of your decision, and tell em that I wish for you to be taught to shape the Universe as we have.** _Curling a wing around the Messenger's in a gesture of friendship and gratitude, the Lightbringer shared eir warmth for a moment._ **I cannot thank you enough for doing this. Go on— I will follow soon. I am… demonstrating something for my friend, here.** _At that, the small Malakh that had been waiting at the Lightbringer's side gave a ripple of delight._

 **I will,** _said the Messenger, and performed the peculiar little twist into the Haven's entryway of bent space. Ey travelled through it some way, but instead of continuing, ey stopped once ey was just far enough that ey saw the signs that the Lightbringer could no longer detect em._

 _Even accounting for the distortion caused by the strange entry space, there was no mistaking the pride the Lightbringer was expressing or the undiluted adoration rolling through the small Malakh, dwarfed though it might have been by the Lightbringer's enormity and brilliance. As ey watched, the Lightbringer reached out with a wing and_ plucked _, and something very strange came over the tiny Malakh in the wake of that motion. It shuddered once and then darkened, its glow seeping away into a malevolent non-light that stood out even against the dark sea between the suns. Whirling up and away, ey watched it go, caught between total confusion and a renewed wave of horror._

 _Something was terribly, terribly wrong._

 _Ey only wished ey knew what, and how ey could get eir siblings back— the ones ey flew entwined with, the ones ey loved, not whatever this was that they had become._

.***.

There's endless north Kansas farmland out Dean's window when he wakes up, but it barely registers.

Whoever the three big, bright dudes in his dreams are, they're _dicks_ , especially that really bright one. Not that Dean can really argue with the guy about being a bit suspicious of the spooky, huge _thing_ just lurking around in space, but Dean's seen the freaky shit that happens when people try to build whole communities isolated from the world, and _everyone_ knows that preaching stuff that ain't true only ends in pain for whoever the preacher doesn't like. That's not even covering the fact that Big Bright had _killed_ one of his own group and then turned the pieces into… well, littler versions of the dead guy, which is _seriously_ creepy.

How the hell you kill a guy, tear him apart, and magically turn the bits into tinier, _living_ guys is entirely beyond Dean.

Maybe the glowy soup people are like starfish?

Dean's dreams are fuckin' _weird_.

Still, that bright place toward the end of the dream had been… maybe not the 'I've-been-there' kind of familiar, but definitely the 'I've-been-somewhere-like-this' kind. Heaven had been a lot more understandable— hallways, fancy lights, gardens, memories, and all that— but something about that white place had seemed really, really similar, kinda like the motels Dean stays at. The decor and shit changes, yeah, but the grime on the keys, the mildew, and the questionable stains never do. The white place had been blank and fake, just like Heaven.

A bit too much like it, actually, and after Sam (or had it been Gadreel?) had told him that he'd essentially recounted the history of the Universe in retelling those early dreams, it has Dean wondering if maybe this isn't something real, too. "Hey, Chuck?"

Chuck yips; the car swerves wildly into the other lane before he can get it under control. "You scared the shit out of me!" he gasps, white-knuckling the steering wheel.

"Jesus, I hope not. I ain't cleaning up after you," Dean replies. He grins when Chuck shoots him a disapproving glare. "Sorry, man. I just had a question. You up for answering, or you need a minute to breathe?"

Turns out ex-prophets aren't too shabby at bitchfaces. "I'm _fine_ ," Chuck states flatly. "What's your question?"

Dean lifts open hands in surrender. "I'm sorry, okay? It's just… what did Heaven look like before there were humans?"

Chuck glances at Dean in confusion. "Did you, uh. Did you have another dream?" At Dean's nod, he frowns. "I… you know, it's not much different than it is now, really. Not counting time, humans only move and process in three dimensions, but Heaven exists in four, so… a lot of what humans see isn't really the whole picture. It's mostly the result of their thoughts and memories imprinting on the lower three dimensions of Heaven. It's, uh, really malleable." Without needing to be directed, he turns the Subaru off of 281 and down the little country road that leads to the bunker. "So, to answer your question… I guess it didn't look like much. Light? There's probably a lot of that; angels are really energetic. Uh. Not hyperactive energetic; like… uh, they run hotter? Physics energetic." He eyes Dean curiously. "Does that help?"

"Sorta does, actually, yeah." Getting to his back pocket in a car with a sore back is awkward as hell, but his cheap-ass 'FBI' cards are there. "I dunno if I'll remember to call you, dude, so… take this. Call me if you find _anything_ in those notes of yours about those marks, or a big black space thing, or the aliens at the beginning of the Universe." At Chuck's incredulous expression, Dean rolls his eyes. "I know, I know, crazy talk, but seriously. Whatever happened with Cas is connected to all this, I'm sure of it, 'cause if Heaven's really like you're saying, I think I saw it the way angels do, dude. I gotta know something I've seen might help me get him back. If you won't do it for me, do it for him."

Chuck brings the car to a halt and turns. He stares at Dean searchingly for a moment or two. "Huh," he says, sounding almost surprised. "You're serious?"

Dean scowls. "As a fuckin' heart attack."

That brings a smile to Chuck's face that, for some reason, strikes Dean as strangely knowing. "Okay, then," the ex-prophet chuckles. "I'll do that."

"Promise?" Dean demands. "No jerkin' me around or disappearing, man. This is Cas."

"Promise," agrees Chuck. "You'll hear from me soon, I swear."

Satisfied, Dean exits the car and hurries down the stair to the bunker. He's got research to do.

.***.

'Neurotic' must be a prerequisite for being a prophet, because Kevin jumps a mile when Dean plunks down across from him with a fresh notebook, a pen, and an armful of books on angel lore. "What the hell, Dean? Warn a guy!"

Maybe it's a little unkind for Dean to just chuckle at the poor kid, but he's a big boy and seriously, _no one_ doesn't laugh when someone makes a noise like _that_. "I said hello when I walked in, Kev. You had warning." Flipping open the top book in his pile, he skims the table of contents and ignores Kevin's staring.

"So, uh… are you gonna explain why you've got some kind of… uh, really crappy Harry Potter costume makeup going on? You know the scar was on his forehead, right?"

Dean touches his right cheek, where he knows the upper ends of the branching red marks Cas left are plainly visible, even through his stubble. He weighs the pros and cons of telling the whole damn story. "Cas," he says at length, deciding to leave the director's cut for another day. "He had to go through me to get the other guy."

Kevin stares for a moment longer before apparently giving up. "Okay. And Sam?"

"Uh," Dean says, because how the hell does he explain this? 'Oh yeah, Sam's been possessed by an angel and said angel was assigned to kill you, but turns out the angel's terrified of some ancient angel myth that I've gotten tangled up in, so that's been called off, but now the angel and Sam are out there somewhere doing God knows what'?

'Cause that'll totally fly.

"He's on a job," Dean finally says. "It's… we kinda fought about it, 'cause he hasn't been feeling well, and…"

Kevin rolls his eyes. "You said something shitty," he cuts in, and while his exasperation is plainly tempered by affection, the statement cuts deeper than either of them expect. Dean's surprise must read like protest, though, because Kevin lifts a quelling hand. "Listen, I'm sure you had a good point, but this is how it always goes. Just call him up, apologize, and _please_ don't start another Apocalypse trying to solve whatever it was that started the fight."

Bowing his head, Dean stares down at the table of contents of the book in front of him and doesn't see a word of it. He knows it's irrational to feel so fuckin… he's not _hurt_ , or _sad_ , or any of that crap. He's… _offended_. Yeah. Not hurt, offended. There hadn't been any real judgement or disappointment in Kevin's tone, sure, but he also knows it hu— _is annoying_ because it's sorta true. When he and Sam really butt heads, Dean's mouth just… spits shit out without asking his brain, 'cause Sammy's always had a knack for breaking down his filters. He hates it, but it's never been something he's been able to stop, no matter how hard he tries, and 'I didn't mean it that way' is right up there with 'I'm not racist, but…' in the bullshit-o-meter red zone, so it's not like he has any justifiable way to explain why he's such a dick.

It sucks that everyone thinks he's _actually_ an asshole, instead of being a dude with a brain that just goes and says all the shit that everyone else probably says in their heads when they're pissed off, anyway.

"Uh," says Kevin, softly and a bit guilty. "I… that was kind of… are you okay?"

Dean rolls his eyes— Sammy and all his _feelings_ must've rubbed off on the kid, 'cause Dean sure doesn't encourage that kind of shit. "Of course I'm fine, Jesus, can't a guy think for a moment?" He crosses his arms and sits back in his chair, pretending that he doesn't see Kevin seeing right through his act. Casting about for a diversion without being too obvious about it, Dean's gaze lands on the angel tablet sitting in front of Kevin on the table. Perfect. "So, angel tablet," he says, pointing. "Anything about Heaven in there?"

Kevin frowns. "Uh, yeah, a lot. It _is_ the _angel tablet_."

"Yep, you're totally right, angels and Heaven," Dean agrees glibly, because he's _this_ close to dodging the feelings-talk bullet, "but is there anything about, I dunno, the people who built Heaven?"

Kevin's expression goes from 'resigned to doing things Dean's way' to 'what the fuck are you talking about, Dean' in about half a second. "Dude, what?" he demands, eyeing Dean askance. "Dean, _God_ built Heaven."

Diversion successfully (and usefully) executed, Dean scoots back and kicks his heels up onto the table. "Yeah, but does it _say_ that anywhere?"

He gets one last, raised, 'I-know-what-you're-up-to' eyebrow before Kevin caves and goes back to the tablet, running his finger over the tightly-packed lines of runes. "See? Right here," he says, tapping the stone. "It says, ' _And God said, 'These are the things I give to you that you might shape the Universe, and also a safe Haven from the Darkness, and the_ … uh, I think that's 'evil', but it might be 'cold', or maybe 'bitterness'? Let's go with _Evil, and all that lies Between_.' So there. God gave them Heaven."

Dean narrows his eyes, thinking hard. He never had been the best in school— why bother, when he was exhausted, stressed, and wouldn't be there much longer?— but he isn't stupid, and thanks to Sammy's occasional demonstrations, he has a decent sense of how to look at something from different angles, especially when its meaning can change if it's read different. He has the sneaking suspicion that this is one of those times, too, because something here isn't gelling. "Wait a minute. Read that again. Slowly."

"And God said, 'These are the things I give to you that you might shape the Universe, and also a safe Haven from—"

"There," Dean interrupts. "That part. The way you're reading it, God gives the angels Heaven, right?"

Kevin nods. "Uh, _yeah_. That's what it says."

Lifting his hands defensively, Dean sits back a bit. "Dude, I'm not saying your reading's _wrong_ , but what if it's not the only way to read that? You've put a, uh, what's it called. A pause in there. 'God gave them the ability to shape the Universe— _pause_ — and also a safe haven'."

"The word you're looking for is 'comma', Dean," Kevin says.

Dean blushes, this time out of a shame he thought long since repressed. It transmutes to defensive snark quickly enough, but the reminder that he's down as a _stupid_ asshat in Kevin's book kinda hurts. "Thank you, Herr Grammar, but seriously, _whatever_. You put a comma pause in there. Is there one?"

"Well, no, but-"

"Okay, so you've put it there, so what about this? What if there isn't one? What if it's 'God gave them the ability to shape the Universe _and_ the ability to shape a safe haven? Dude, we've _gotta_ get an angel down here."

Kevin splutters as Dean gathers up his angel books. "What? Why?"

Dean grins. "We're gonna _ask_ , dude." Besides, if he's right (and he's pretty damn sure he is), he'll have proof right there.

"This is a terrible idea," Kevin says. He follows Dean down to the dungeon anyway, scuttling out of his way when Dean does an about-face for the garage instead. Dungeon's no good— Crowley's down there, and Dean doesn't want the smug bastard running loose when Metatron's out there somewhere, apparently hellbent (heaven-bent?) on crossing out every name in his black book. The guy does _not_ need help. "Are you calling Castiel? I really hope you're calling Castiel. How are they gonna get down here, anyway? All the angels are grounded."

"Not any more," Dean replies. "Someone 'blew the Gates wide open', apparently, and it's enough that Angel Air is back online. Megatron's been moving to deal with the folks he sees as threats, but I figure he's gonna be on the back foot for a while as he deals with pissed off angels, so now's as good a time as any to get some information, right?" He ducks out briefly to run for and rummage through the storage room, returning with a clay flask of holy oil, chalk, and the parts for an angel summoning. "We're gonna have to ask some other angel, though. Cas isn't picking up."

Still dubious, Kevin takes up the chalk and begins to write on the open lane down the middle of the garage. "I'm gonna laugh when you're wrong and we end up with an angel in the garage instead," he says as he writes. "It's gonna smite that stupid car of yours, and I'm gonna _laugh_."

"I'm gonna laugh when I'm right and… and _your_ car gets smote. Smited. In the future, right as you buy it."

Kevin raises an eyebrow at that, too, but it's got just enough amusement in it that Dean doesn't feel like a total moron this time. He flips through his angel book, skims the list of names, sticks a finger on a random name, and hopes the angel he's picked— Hannah, whoever they are— is still around. They stand back when Dean tosses the match to light the holy oil and Kevin finishes the summoning incantation.

There's a flare of brilliant, swirling light, and then a stocky, dark-haired woman stands in the ring of flame, wide-eyed and panting. She's covered in gore.

"Holy shit," yelps Kevin. "Dean, what the fuck!"

The woman sinks to her knees. "I don't understand?" she says, staring around herself in a daze. "It… Winchester?"

Dean and Kevin share a baffled glance. "Uh. Hannah," Dean ventures, stepping closer to the fire. It's burning hotter than he remembers it usually doing— must have been a good batch of oil. "You're in the Men of Letters bunker, Hannah. We, uh, had a question?"

Hannah just stares up at him, bewildered.

"Who built Heaven, Hannah?" asks Kevin. He shuffles uncomfortably when her wide-eyed gaze falls on him. "We, um. We need to know. Who built Heaven?"

"They were all dead, but… but it sounded like Heaven, and then the Gates, and…?" The angel seats herself inside the ring and wraps her arms around her knees. "Oh Father," she gasps, and hides her face in her arms and knees.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Dean says, but he can't get close enough to the flames to put them out. "Kev, help me out here, man, this ain't right."

It takes some time— Kevin is just as jittery as Dean around the flames and the garage's ancient fire extinguisher refuses to work, so the prophet ends up resorting to throwing an old bag of concrete mix over the flaming oil. They manage to get the shocky angel up to the library, where they install her on one of the comfier chairs and wrap a blanket around her shaking shoulders. She calms after a while, and lifts her head to regard Dean and Kevin with damp eyes. "It was a trap," she says. The first hint of anger begins to kindle in her eyes. "Someone led us there to be slaughtered."

Dean and Kevin share yet another look, this time of alarm. "Okay, Hannah, we're gonna look into it, y'hear?" Dean reassures her, and means every word. If someone's killing angels, it means Cas is at risk, and he's not gonna have that happen on his watch. "Listen, Hannah, this is important— can you tell us who built Heaven? It could help us shake Metatron outta there."

The shaky spark of anger very quickly fans into a flame. "I can," she replies, still wobbly but with growing confidence. "I can and I will tell you, because Malachi was vicious to individuals, but Metatron— _he took our wings_. This is his work, I know it." She clenches her hands into fists around the blanket. "It was the Archangels."

Dean shoots a smug look back at Kevin, who scowls. "The Archangels built Heaven? Like Michael, Raphael, Lucifer, and Gabriel? Those Archangels?"

Hannah nods. "God gave Their Archangels the knowledge to shape the Universe, and the Archangels in turn taught the Seraphim, who helped them craft Heaven. When we, the least of the Malakhim, were born when the Darkness was sealed away, the Seraphim taught us, that we might be armed against it in the event that it finds a way to return."

Almost as if to punctuate her pronouncement, there's a thunderous **boom** from the atrium as something impacts the door with force.

"Metatron?" Kevin asks, beginning to move around to the end of the table farthest from the door.

Hannah stands from her chair and sheds her blanket. "I would not doubt it." Another boom and a crack cut through the air, and she goes rigid.

"Metatron is there, and so is the Knight of Hell."


	8. Chapter 8

Second chapter for y'all because my weekend is shaping up to be as crummy as my week was. Thanks for reading.

Comments are hugely, hugely appreciated. :)

 _.***._

 _.***._

 _Though the Messenger struggled with fear, loneliness, and grief in the time that followed eir departure from the Haven, there was work to be done, and the blessed, numb distraction of throwing emself into eir observations of the new planetary system was vastly preferable to drowning in eir own worries, fears, and sorrows. Sometimes ey wondered if coping through work was wise, but as the fear, confusion, and sadness steadily faded from a roar to a tolerable background hum, ey couldn't find it in emself to question its effectiveness any further. Progress was progress, and who was ey to argue with finally feeling a bit more like emself again?_

 _Besides, there were interesting things happening in eir system of spheres and Sun._

 _In attempting to distract emself from eir pain, the Messenger had determined that in-depth explorations of each of the spheres were in order. Starting with the innermost sphere, ey had used some of what the Largest had taught em to pass through the stone and metal of the spheres, allowing em to examine them right down to their very cores. The first was a small, half-frozen, half-melted world covered in scars from the time of bombardment— nothing tremendously notable other than its temperature extremes— but the second was larger and beautiful, with a delicate atmosphere and broad, sparkling oceans of liquid water. Stately and serene, it rotated on its axis so slowly that it completed a full circuit about the Sun in less time than it took for it to complete a single rotation. The third world, by contrast, was swathed in a thick and noxious atmosphere that sealed in heat, raising its temperature well beyond what mere solar heating would have accomplished. Accompanied by a satellite sphere that had formed from the ring of debris left over from an earlier sphere-sphere collision, it rotated swiftly, completing just under three hundred and seventy rotations for every circuit about the Sun. Its greater distance, however, meant its circuits took longer than those of the lovely second or harsh first spheres. Finally, there was the fourth sphere, smaller than the second or third, which sported small, chilly oceans, a longer-still circuit period, and a thin atmosphere._

 _Over time, changes came to the spheres. The Sun, as it aged, grew steadily brighter; this led to the reduction of the seas on the lovely second sphere. Even as its seas became thick clouds of heat-trapping vapor, the third sphere's viscous atmosphere was thinning as roiling seas beneath the clouds and huge, drifting plates of its hard crust steadily absorbed the heavier, insulating gases. It was almost as if the two were trading features— soon the third sphere was as serene and sparkling as the second had once been, and the second was broiling and utterly shrouded, insulating gases all released from where they had been trapped in its waters and rocks. The third sphere's temperatures plummeted; the second's skyrocketed, easily overtaking even the first, closest sphere to the Sun for highest surface temperature in the system._

 _The oceans of the third sphere, though sparkling and lovely like those of the first, were not identical. Less transparent and filled with heavier, more complex molecules, they were a veritable soup of chemistry; the Messenger was always curious to see what new things had come together by way of contact, or by way of energization by lightning from the storms that grew and died in the atmosphere. With time, eir curiosity and attention was rewarded— upon returning from a brief visit to the fourth sphere (it was losing its atmosphere, and its oceans were being lost as vapor in the dropping pressure), ey discovered that some of the most complex molecules had, by some miraculous chance, begun to self-replicate._

 _Though indisputably wondrous, the replication was by no means a perfect process. Even in the shallows of the seas, the environment was harsh and the molecules were subject to time and weathering in much the same way as stars, though on a vastly shorter scale; taken together, it resulted in spontaneous changes to the shape or the composition of the molecules, most of which were invariably fatal to that particular replicating line. Some, however, proved beneficial, and those lines went on to replicate faster or more effectively than others, and soon there was a line that boasted a membrane surrounding the coding material for replication, and a membraned line that had subsumed another, smaller line and developed a symbiosis of sorts within the shared membrane, on and on and on over the face of the rocky sphere, until the whole planet was filled with tiny, membrane-cell_ ** _creatures_** _, all descended from a few complex chains of molecules that had somehow fallen together in such a way as to self-replicate._

 _Ey had never been so in awe of the One's creation. Though they were infinitesimally small and lived for mere fractions of instants in the grand scale of the Universe's lifespan, they were complex, born of patterns of matter in the same way the Malakhim were born of patterns of energy. As more and more spontaneous mutations occurred in the replicating lines, some of the creatures soon became like the Malakhim in motility, propelling themselves through the water with specialized structures that varied from line to line. Then they were like the Malakhim in that the membrane-cells clustered into hosts of cells, and then there came the specialization of cells within the hosts, and then there were pigmented cells, a myriad of motile limbs, creatures that subsisted by converting the very sunlight into food using reaction material that had been gradually tuned over generations, creatures that ate other creatures— it was an explosion of life, a miracle, and ey could barely contain eir wonder._

 _Ey was so caught up in eir observations, so hypnotized by the creatures that were now spreading over the dry land that rose from the seas, though, that ey didn't notice that the Largest was approaching until the larger Malakh was almost on top of em._

 _Ey was not ashamed that eir first reaction to the sight of the Largest was to spread emself wide and protective over as much of the teeming sphere as ey could, wings and fronts snapping with eir Grace in a show of aggression. It was a meaningless gesture, ultimately— the Largest was great enough to envelop the sphere in its entirety, while ey could only cover perhaps a third of it— but ey could not be sure that the Largest was not involved somehow with the Lightbringer or the Smallest, who would surely harm the life-forms if they were willing to sunder one of their own kind. Ey could not and_ ** _would not_** _bear the risk the destruction or fatal warping of the beautiful creatures and systems of life. If it meant driving off eir sibling, ey would do it. Solitude was no curse when there was work to be done._

 _The Largest, however, was not interested in the waters, or what was in them, or even the Messenger's defensive display. Eir fronts and currents flashed and twisted with alarm in a way the Messenger hadn't seen since they had fully comprehended the first distant, dreadful death of a sun._ **A scourge,** _cried the Largest,_ **a terrible scourge, dark and rapacious! It came from between the stars and** ** _devoured_** **one of the lower Malakhim!**

 _There was no lie in the Largest's body language— at least, not from what ey could see after devoting a great deal of time watching eir reflection in the waters, learning possible tells of falsification._ **Where is it now?** _the Messenger demanded, rising from the world's surface to meet the Largest. Ey would take the warning as genuine, for as disturbing as everything ey had seen of and in the Haven had been, ey would never find a way to fix the Host if they were all gone, eaten by some unknown thing._ **What is being done to curtail it?**

 **It disappeared to the dark Between before we could catch it,** _the Largest replied, wings and fronts spread and tuned for the greatest possible visual acuity._ **It is but a fifth of your size, Messenger, but until it strikes, it neither radiates nor reflects. The Lightbringer has taken the Healer and part of the Host to the Sun, where ey is constructing a trap to seal off its source of power.**

 _Something wasn't right. If the thing was so unknown and unobservable, how did the Lightbringer know that it had a source of power? Before the Messenger could ask eir question, though, a dark splotch appeared on the horizon, growing swiftly until it had occluded the disk of the rising sun._

 _It was, the Messenger realized as it continued to grow in size as it approached, just about the right size to be…_ **No.**

 _The Largest, whose wings had begun to crackle and sing with Grace in response to the thing's appearance, gave an affirmative curl._ **Yes, Messenger! That is the thing!** _ey hissed, shining brighter and brighter as ey allowed more and more of emself to unfurl._ **Messenger, do you see now?**

 **I see too much!** _the Messenger roared in response, flaring eir own wings as ey joined the Largest._ **Largest, I know what that is!** _Cutting off the Largest's startled exclamation, the Messenger played back eir memory of watching the Lightbringer reach out and change the tiny Malakh. There was no mistaking it— warped though its currents were, their structure had not changed in the time since its unnatural birth, and the thing was plainly recognizable as the result of the Lightbringer's actions._

 _Focussing eir energies, the Messenger reached deep into the seas and pulled forth matter as the Largest had taught em so very long ago in the Haven, crafting them into a shining, pointed spear that buzzed with the disruptive harmonics ey channelled through its haft. Leaping ahead of the stunned Largest, ey unfurled to eir fullest extent, searing the twisted remnant of the smaller Malakh with eir light. As it recoiled, stung, the Messenger plunged eir spear through its very core without hesitation, feeling only relief as the weapon's humming resonance fatally disrupted the flow of energy through the remnant's corrupted structures._

 _Once ey was completely certain the warped Malakh had been truly eradicated, ey whirled on the Largest._ **You will take me to the Lightbringer,** _ey said, and it was a statement of truth._ **You will take me, and you will tell me** ** _everything you know._**

 _Orders were enough to shake the Largest from eir horrified paralysis._ **I… I will,** _ey replied._ **I will, but…**

 _Without warning, the Universe shuddered, and suddenly there was silence where the Messenger had never realized there had been sound, stillness where ey had never noticed there was motion._

 _Whatever the Lightbringer had done, the Messenger had the dreadful feeling that it had affected far, far more than their star system._

 _.***._

Dean wakes to something itchy all over his chest. "Whuh?"

A blurry face swims into view, then resolves as Dean's vision clears. Kevin looks as exasperated as ever, but he also looks _spooked._ "You stay right there, Dean," he snaps, swatting Dean's hands back to his sides. "Don't touch those; they're all that's keeping that Grace where it is."

It takes Dean's brain a little while to fully process that statement, and then he's just confused. "Thought it was jus' a… a rezzi-whatsit?"

A woman, dusky skin spattered with dried blood, approaches and gently presses two fingers to Dean's forehead. The itching on his chest stops, and the ache in his back dies down a bit. "With a strong resonance, a channelling can reach the soul. It's very rare, but it has happened once before," she says, daubing her fingers into a jar held in one hand. She begins to paint over his skin with clinical precision. "There is, however, no precedent for _surviving_ such a deep channelling." With the completion of whatever she's painting, the ache in his back recedes further still. "Even with a conduit to your soul, the residual Grace should not be surviving; as such, I am taking measures to ensure you are protected from it until I have a better understanding of what is happening."

"Fuck my life," Dean mutters, and lets his head fall back to the rolled-up flannel it had been resting on. Looking up at the ceiling, his gaze drifts over one of the cleverly-hidden devil's traps in the ceiling panels, and something occurs to him. "Uh. Guys? What happened to Metatron and Abaddon?" Hadn't that been a thing? He's pretty sure he remembers that being a thing. "Why aren't we… you know, kicking ass?"

The woman— Hannah, Dean remembers now— finishes daubing on a last, complicated sigil. "You fell unconscious," she says simply, "and while I instructed the prophet in stabilizing you, I added to the protections already present. When they could not overcome the wards, they proceeded to lay siege to this place." Gazing around the room (and probably the whole bunker, if the glint of light in her pale eyes is any indicator), she nods with satisfaction. The nod is joined by a smile when another resounding bang cracks through the air. "I am impressed by its construction. These 'Men of Letters' were very thorough in their work."

Glancing over at Kevin, Dean takes in the prophet's (relatively) relaxed stance. That's a good sign— if the king of jumpy, high-strung teenagers is reasonably chill around a strange angel while a dick with wings and a demon do their damnedest (ha!) to bust down their door, the strange angel's gotta be at least a little bit okay. He turns his gaze back to Hannah, who meets it with her own dispassionate stare. "You're stickin' around for a Winchester? Cas' best buddy?"

Hannah sniffs. "Dislike you and Castiel though I might, I can safely assure you that my feelings toward Metatron are more negative on an _exponential_ scale." She presses her fingers to Dean's forehead one last time; the sigils on his skin glimmer and then vanish, taking with them the last of the pain in his back.

Dean gets to his feet as soon as Hannah steps back from his side and surveys the ruins of his old t-shirt. Shrugging, he unrolls his flannel and pulls it on. "So, what's your plan?" he asks.

"You are a Winchester," the angel replies, as if that explains everything.

For once, Dean and Kevin are on the same page. They both eye Hannah skeptically, and Dean shakes his head. "Not sure you want everything that comes with that, lady."

Hannah sighs. "I am aware of your history, Dean Winchester. As it stands, you are my best bet at surviving this situation, and considerably improve the odds of seeing Metatron's reign brought to an end." Her grey-green eyes glint as she bares her teeth in something that isn't quite a smile. "I will enjoy that eventuality."

Dean and Kevin share wide-eyed glances. "Right. Okay. Step one of the plan— don't get in your way. Got it." Surveying the library, Dean steps over to the shelves and pulls a few volumes on demons. "Kev, I'm gonna go grab the books we left in the garage. Grab your notes on the demon tablet and go over them for anything to deal with a Knight of Hell. Then, go see if you've got anything that'll nuke an angel from a distance on the angel tablet." He points at Hannah. "You, I want going through those books. They're the oldest and weirdest ones, and sometimes those are the best ones. If you finish, check the others on the shelves." He watches the angel and the prophet get to work, sighs. "They're gonna try nasty shit to get us to open up, okay? Just… don't open the door. If anyone's going out there, it's me." Kevin looks like he wants to argue, but Dean just glares him down. "Sit down and read. I won't have to go out there if we find something quick enough."

Kevin subsides reluctantly. "We never do," he mutters, "but okay, whatever."

.***.

"We are _not_ talking with Crowley," Kevin snarls as he snatches up sheaves of his notes. The tablets are already clutched protectively to his chest; the notes, flimsy as they are, don't fare so well as they're crammed into the same grip. "Nope. Not doing it."

Dean sends a pleading look at Hannah, but she simply stares back impassively, offering neither support nor opposition. "Aww, come _on,_ there's nothing here! No way is Abaddon falling for that demon bomb thing, and Metatron's… well, he's no Mike or Lucy, but he's a sneaky little shit, and he _wrote_ those things, okay? We need a sneaky bastard of our own for this."

Kevin scowls at Dean over a messy fan of crumpled paper. "I'll open the door if you do." When both Dean and Hannah shoot him alarmed looks, he rolls his eyes and tosses his head with exasperation. " _What_ , and striking some deal with a _crossroads demon who hates our guts_ isn't just as bad?! Dude, those doors are open either way if you go down there!"

She doesn't look pleased about it, but Hannah turns to Dean and gives one small shake of her head.

Dean throws his hands up with a growl. "Fine! Fine, Jesus, okay! No talking to Crowley. Whatever." Slamming himself back into his chair, he snatches up _Encyclopaedia Pan Daemonica_ and slams it open in front of himself. "I'll go over all these useless, stupid books _again_ and find all the stuff that's already in the tablet _again_ and we'll all sit around and do nothing useful while—"

A tremendous _CRASH_ echoes through the bunker.

"Was that…?" Kevin asks.

"The garage," Dean agrees.

Hannah doesn't say anything, just starts running in the direction she'd seen Dean go earlier.

Dean's close on her heels, but as soon as he hears footsteps behind his own, he skids to a halt. "No, no, no," he says, catching Kevin before he runs past. " _You_ go back to that library, get your tablets and your papers, get your ass to my room and grab the angel blade under the bed, lock your rocks and your papers in one of the salted boxes, then shut yourself into the dungeon. You cover those doors with every protective scribble you know, got it?"

"But—"

"Kevin," Dean interrupts, because he's pretty sure he's worn exactly that kind of concerned, intent expression before running off to do something _heinously stupid_. "Dude. Listen. Abaddon wants everyone dead, but Metatron? He's here for you, dude— you can read those tablets, which means you can throw a wrench in his plans, okay?" Sucking in a deep breath, Dean screws up his courage, chokes down his pride, and grabs Kevin in a brief but tight hug. "Kid, you're important 'cause you can fight this guy with your crazy prophet mojo brain, but you're _family_ , and… and I can't lose any more family, y'hear? So go. Get the tablets and get your ass downstairs."

The hug seems to be what does it, because Kevin throws his arms around Dean in return. "You're a _moron_ ," he growls, but it's plainly an endearment. "You better come down and tell me it's safe to come out _pronto_ , 'cause if I have to spend more than an hour or two with _Crowley…_ "

"Purified blood's in the blue curse box by the storeroom door. If that don't keep him happy, I dunno what will," Dean says quickly, extricating himself from Kevin's embrace. "G'wan, kid. Guy's a slimy jerk, but he'll be fighting to survive, too, if… well. Make him think you'll be useful and he'll keep you with him when he runs away, 'cause he always does. Now get— I've got a garage to shore up."

If he waits until he's sure Kevin's turned the corner into the library before running like hell for the garage, no one's around to give Dean shit about it.

Hannah's in front of the garage doors when Dean catches up to her, palms pressed flat against the metal and feet planted at shoulder width; she looks immovable, every line in her body tensed as she braces the doors. Whorls and loops of blue-white light spurt from her skin and clothing as if under pressure before being sucked back out of sight by some unseeable force.

Without warning, the doors buckle under a brutal impact, then flare blue-white as Hannah's Grace blooms out from her vessel, spilling into and against the metal. The dent in the door corrects itself with a shriek, and the light fades. "They are using conventional impacts," the angel grunts, resetting her feet on the floor.

"Fuck," spits Dean. It's the Bunker's one shortcoming, really, next to the fact that any old human with a key can get in— though the builders designed it for strength and warded it six ways to Sunday against everything from angels to zombies, high-powered mechanical force from plain old _stuff_ was not the sort of thing they'd anticipated having to deal with. Add to that the fact that doors are never quite as strong as the walls they're put into?

They're in a lot of trouble. "Thought they'd try other shit before this, like hostages or something. What the fuck?"

"Why put the effort—" Hannah grits out, more skeins and rippling swirls of Grace escaping as she repairs the damage from a third, still-larger impact, "—into a kidnapping that'll only lure _you_ out when breaking down the door to get at you _and_ the prophet merely requires a large enough rock?"

Dean raises his eyebrows. "Huh." He can't help flinching back from the fourth impact, which hits with such force that he can hear the suspensions of the cars in the garage complaining. "So… they're gonna get through eventually, aren't they?"

"Yes."

Doing a bit of mental math, Dean comes to the only logical conclusion. "When I give the word, step back," he orders. Throwing open the Impala's trunk, he grabs one of the spare angel blades and a holy water Super Soaker. Against a Knight of Hell, it's about as useful as fighting a wildfire with a tin bucket, but it'll be enough to buy Hannah a bit of time to act. Hopefully. _Could really use your help right about now, Cas,_ he prays. "Get away from the doors."

"What?"

"When I tell you to, step back." Dashing for the garage entrance, Dean throws the emergency doors shut, a grim smile forming when he hears the 'click' on the other side of the handleless plates of steel. He levels the Super Soaker as he hurries back to Hannah's side, squints against the neon Silly String glare of another impact absorbed and neutralized by Hannah's Grace. _Come on, Cas. Even if you don't remember me, Metatron and Abaddon are banging down my garage door and I need you here._ He rolls his eyes at Hannah's incredulous, luminous glare. "Listen. It's either brace that door until you're outta juice and we both get slaughtered, or step back and put that energy toward holding them off until I can get help down here." Loops and prominences of energy ripple over and through and around her body in an even, rolling boil now; her vessel's skin is covered in a tracery of sunburnt red where the Grace loops vanish back into her. "You're not gonna last more than an hour like this. You're all… bursting at the seams."

Hannah's searching glare is about as close to literal laser death ray eyes as Dean has ever come, but when she can't even get her Grace to _start_ to retreat after yet another impact, she capitulates to Dean's reasoning. "Very well."

Hannah steps back and, when the damage from the next impact comes, it stays.

The second impact is followed by an ominous groan, and Dean's prayers go wide-band.

With the third, the doors fall.


	9. Chapter 9

Work is incredibly busy, but I was able to get this done on time! Huzzah. Hopefully I'll manage that for the next updates, too- there are lots of departmental meetings and academies and out-of-state congresses and the two publication databases I'm managing and I'm taking on another department's database next week and frankly I'm not sure how I found time to write, never mind sleep. ANYWAY. I really hope this is enjoyable for you, and thanks so much for reading! Please feel welcome to say hi, or ask questions, or point out typos.

I'm going to go get a manicure and go play Magic, because I've decided it's spoil-myself Saturday. Maybe if I'm lucky, I'll run into that navy blue '67 Impala Super Sport 427 with racing stripes that someone around town owns. That or the '66 Chevelle Malibu.

Getting under the hoods of those beauties would make my week...

.***.

.***.

It's a walking flashback to his forty years in Hell as it steps almost daintily over the mangled steel of the doors, spilling tar and squirming, white worms in its wake.

He remembers the old ones; honestly, it's hard not to after forty years of their undivided attentions. He remembers nightmare-fuel visages, horrorshow mashups of everything disturbing the world had to offer, from gore and filth to wicked edges and gleaming, pitiless steel; he remembers the way there was always just enough vestigial humanity— hands, lips, tits, junk, the shape of the body, the way they moved— that he could never forget that they were not monsters but the end-state of human beings, of _people._

He remembers the old ones, and the demon that stands atop the sundered garage doors, perfect chin raised as the rest of its body roils with billions of maggots and weeps foul ichor, is impossible to mistake for anything but.

"Dean," it says, fever-bright crimson lips curling into a smile below the bloody-edged void that sits where the upper half of its head should be. "How lovely to see you."

"Abaddon," Dean growls in return as a clot of grubs falls away from the demon's torso with a nauseating splat, exposing black cloth and a familiar print. "Loving the new look. Didn't know 'covered in maggots' was in vogue." He readjusts his grip on the Super Soaker but doesn't move to fire, fully prepared to banter as long as the demon wants if it'll buy him time. Hannah, her own blade at the ready, seems to be following his cues.

Abaddon laughs. "Oh, that's interesting," it purrs. "I didn't know you could see past the costume." It gestures down its body with a sumptuous wave of one taloned hand. Wriggling grubs splatter to the floor in a puddle of black ichor with the motion. "Do you like? They _do_ say to dress to your strengths."

Dean wants to make some witty retort, draw out the usual stupid villain chatter more, but some deeper part of his subconscious reacts automatically when there's a strange shift in the air. Whirling in place, Dean's raised angel blade crashes against Metatron's. "What the _fuck,_ " Dean gasps as he ripostes on autopilot; Metatron lets out an equally startled curse. For all that his vessel's a dumpy little dude, Metatron is no slouch with a blade, and Dean has no time to dwell on the hows or whys of his apparent Spidey senses when it takes everything he has to predict and respond to the scribe's feints and seeking jabs. He can hear Hannah engaging Abaddon somewhere behind him, unleashed Grace lighting the room up like a tiny sun.

Sickly blue-grey loops of Grace leap from Metatron's back and flex; Metatron's vessel vanishes, but the Grace leaves a trail behind that Dean follows to Hannah. He reaches her just in time to intercept a second attempt at a sneak attack by the scribe, but his inelegant (if effective) lunge leaves _him_ as Abaddon's primary target, not the angel.

"You're awfully sharp today, Twinkle Toes," Abaddon coos, circling Dean and flexing wickedly sharp, crimson talons that drip with the tar that seeps down its arms. Dean grunts at the impact of a vicious telekinetic blow, staggering sideways and only just avoiding a whistling swipe of those claws. It parries his attempt at a counterattack with a blasé flip of a wrist. "Did your prophet teach you some new tricks? I'll have to get in on that before I tear his little heart out."

Dean doesn't respond, just raises the Super Soaker to intercept another claw swipe. Abaddon shrieks when its claws split the reservoir tank and splatter holy water everywhere; for a moment, the maggots and tar covering its hand and arm are burned away, exposing damp, sagging grey flesh riddled with pits and open sores. Dean's able to press the advantage for a moment and even scores a hit on the exposed arm, but a second on-target blow merely sinks sickeningly into a renewed layer of squirming grubs and ooze. Abaddon trades blocks and attacks for only a few seconds more before lashing out with another telekinetic blast, this one double the strength of the last.

For the second time that day, Dean sails through the air and hits the ground hard. Concrete is nowhere near as forgiving as dirt, though, and Dean gasps as something in his left arm crunches unpleasantly. The Super Soaker clatters away in pieces, useless.

Through swimming vision, Dean sees Abaddon turn and make its way toward the inner garage door; heaving himself to his feet, he lurches after it with a roar. Wriggling white bodies fly out in a spray as Dean's blade slides uselessly through the squirming mass.

"I don't know why you persist in this when you know you stand no chance," Abaddon says as it turns to regard a panting Dean. "Whatever you've done, it's an improvement, but I can't honestly say you've been anything remotely resembling a challenge."

An invisible hand slams down on both of Dean's shoulders, knocking him to his knees before the demon. He bares his teeth up at the blackened abscess in reality and spits. "You'll have to kill me to stop me, bitch," he snarls, struggling against an unseeable iron grip. _Someone just fuckin help me out here,_ he gasps out mentally, throwing the prayer out as widely as he knows how. Somewhere else in the garage, Metatron swears and Hannah lets out some sort of shout in Enochian, drowning out the sounds of blades clashing.

Abaddon runs one slick, grub-covered hand over Dean's cheek; visceral nausea rips through him as everything in his being rejects the slimy, squirming touch and sulfurous stench. "It's almost a shame," it muses while one sharp claw-tip traces the lines Dean knows are still there on his face. "This is such an _interesting_ little experiment you have going, and I'm _so_ curious to know just how far you'll take it." It bends down until Dean can feel the foetid, rot-warm air that flows from the void of its face. "You're right, of course," it says, and Dean screams as the force holding him motionless tightens, cracking ribs and completing the break in his left arm. "You'd give up your own humanity to keep your little family breathing, wouldn't you?" The grip tightens again; Dean's vision begins to go black at the edges. "Your soul, the world and everything in it, even your own brother's free will— why, Dean, I'm frankly impressed." Abaddon runs its hand through his hair; grips tight and yanks his head back. He's almost grateful that he can't feel anything over the pain in his ribs and arm, because he can see the maggots and sludge as they drip down his face, past his eyes. "Still. It's better that I nip this one in—"

The air in the garage twists again, and a new light, savagely blue-white, explodes into being. Abaddon wails, its hand and psychic grip falling away, and Dean crumples to the floor. He smiles as familiar booted feet plant themselves in front of his face. " **Fuck off,** " Sammy booms, the very air vibrating with the force of his voice.

Dean lifts his head just enough to look up at his baby brother, celestial warrior turned up to eleven with a corona of twisting, spiraling currents and sheets of Grace. Six huge, looping currents roar out of and into his back in flowing wings of flame, spread wide and high, and Dean's never been so damn proud. "Sammy," he manages to get out. "Lookin' good, dude."

Sam doesn't turn his gaze to Dean, but one of those coils of light reaches out, warmth shooting through Dean's ribs and arm in a wave of relief. He sags, practically melting into the floor. " **Stay there, Dean. We've got this.** "

Dean smiles, closing his eyes as Sammy vaults up into the air, shining blade raised.

.***.

 _It huddled deep within the inner curls of the Messenger's Grace, shivering and unresponsive, and all the Messenger could do was hold it close, all eighteen wings furled tight about its small, shuddering form._

 _How it was still alive, the Messenger did not know; when ey and the Largest had finally come upon the Lightbringer and eir victim, it had been so tiny and broken that it had been barely recognizable as something living, never mind a Malakh. It had reached for em, though, reached with broken wings and shattered coils even as the Lightbringer tore into it again, its whole being one feeble, desperate cry for salvation, and the Messenger still had difficulty recalling more than a few violent fragments of the events between seeing that dreadful plea and escaping from the fight with the tiny Malakh hidden safely away in the heart of eir own Grace._

 _It huddled, the Messenger curled around it, and the Lightbringer, held fast by the Largest, held emself with cold pride._ **This response is unmerited,** _ey said._ **I have done nothing more than take action against a potential threat to the Host, and yet you assault and restrain me like I am the dangerous one?**

 **You** _ **corrupted**_ **one Malakh and allowed it to destroy another, Lightbringer,** _replied the Largest._

 **You shattered the Second Smallest, and then you shattered half of the small Malakhim born of that sundering,** _added the Messenger._ **There are** _ **thousands**_ **of them now! Why would you do such a thing?**

 _The Lightbringer's brilliant helices and fronts roiled with exasperation._ **I needed a catalyst,** _ey said to the Largest as if speaking to one of the least intelligent of the little Malakhim,_ **and I needed a source of power for the binding.** _That ey said to the Messenger._ **The sacrifice of one Malakh was unfortunate, but all of the new Malakhim survived. I admit they are small and simple, but none of the structures were lost, and the released energy was channelled into** _ **eliminating the single greatest threat to our continued survival.**_ **Throughout it all, that was my purpose— ensuring that the Host survived.**

 **If that was your goal, I fail to see what savaging it after binding it into the shape of so small a Malakh was meant to achieve,** _the Messenger retorted._

 _The reminder of the tiny, battered thing sheltered in the Messenger's Grace was all it took to send a violent flare through the Lightbringer's form._ **It was** _ **justice!**_ _ey roared, thrashing in the Largest's grip._ **We were** _ **dwarfed**_ **by it, we were** _ **vulnerable**_ **, and what did it do? Ignored us, allowed us to** _ **die**_ **, left us to drift cold and terrified in a sunless void! There was no reason for that, not unless it** _ **meant**_ **for us to suffer, and now I have taught it what—**

 _It was as if the Universe developed a grip, immobilizing all three Malakhim where they hovered._

 **ENOUGH,** _came a voice that blasted away all other sounds._

 _The Universe shivered, and the shape of an all-too-familiar Malakh wove into being from its fabric._

 **BE SILENT,** _said the thing that looked exactly like the lost Second Smallest, still in that thundering voice, and there was no other option but to be silent._ **BE STILL,** _the thing that was not a Malakh ordered, and suddenly the thought of disobedience was unbearable._

 _At least, it became unbearable for three of them._

 _In the dead quiet that fell in the wake of those orders, the sound of the tiny, savaged Malakh's agonized keening seemed loud as a scream. It was not visible to any of the others, not with the Messenger's wings furled so closely about it, but the Messenger could see and feel all too clearly that its shuddering continued unabated._

 _As if drawn by gravity, the not-Malakh's attention fell on the tight, golden knot of the Messenger's wings._

 _Discipline collapsed as the Second Smallest began to approach and a horrible parade of possibilities played out in the Messenger's mind. Some part of em understood that it was irrational to assume the worst, but ey had just witnessed the results of eir own sibling, bright and beautiful, committing act after act of stunning, senseless violence. Even if the not-Malakh_ was _what ey thought it was, ey could no longer trust that it would look tolerantly upon a violation of its orders._

 **Don't,** _ey pleaded, and shied away from the thing that looked so like eir lost sibling, for what was one more transgression at this point?_ **Ey is wounded beyond coherence; please, forgive em, or punish me in eir stead, but please— this was not justice, this is not—**

 _The not-Malakh extended a single, vast wing— far greater than the Messenger remembered— and curved it about the Messenger with exquisite gentleness. Understanding and an unassailable calm flooded through em, and the soft whimpers of the tiny Malakh faded away with the shudders that wracked its tiny form._

 _Opening eir wings, the Messenger—_ Gabriel— _looked inward with awe. The tiny Malakh curled quiescent in eir Grace, slumbering under pristine wings that seemed as if they had been cut from the starry heart of the Universe itself. The blue-white glow of eir core glimmered like starlight, unbroken and exquisitely intricate, and the sound of eir currents had all the depth and intensity of the Largest's rich thrum._

 **Messenger,** _came the One's voice. Through the medium of Its Emissary, the sound bloomed within Gabriel's mind as the purest notes, the most exquisite thunder. Ey suspected that, were ey to be exposed to that Voice in its unadulterated form, ey would not survive to recount it._ **Gabriel, my merciful child, my voice.** _Pride that was not eir own flooded Gabriel's being, filling em with exquisite warmth._ **There is work to be done. Will you do it?**

 _Gabriel gazed up at the Emissary, baffled. It had been a very, very long time since the birth of the Malakhim, but their natures were written into their very beings— they existed to fulfill the tasks set forth by the One. Why, then, was ey being offered a choice? Could ey refuse? More importantly, was it safe? The One evidently regarded eir disobedience to protect the tiny Malakh with approval, but would It be so generous if ey refused this new work?_

 _Where would that leave the Host, if Gabriel refused?_

 _Where would it leave the little, starry-winged Malakh?_

 _Ey did not know what ey was being asked to do or whether ey would be capable of fulfilling the One's orders, but there was really no other option. Drawing emself up, trying to look as brave and ready as ey wished ey felt, Gabriel signaled eir assent._ **I will do it.**

 **Good,** _boomed the One through Its Emissary, and vast wings drew Gabriel inward._

 _.***._

 _Miniature wings twitched and fluttered with startlement as a slimy, grey thing emerged from the waters and made its lurching way through the muddy shallows._

 _Gabriel chuckled as eir little charge scuttled away from the flopping animal, only to slowly edge back up to it, coils and fronts plainly arranged in total (if wary) fascination. The dance would continue indefinitely, as it had with so many other creatures and things— Gabriel's little one was as curious as ey was skittish, and Gabriel sometimes felt guilty for how much entertainment ey derived from watching eir little charge scrabble for distance from waves, shadows, bubbles, windblown debris, and now this slow, lumbering fish._

 _Ey was willing to take that joy where ey could find it, though. When the One had poured Itself into Gabriel's mind, while It had worked Namings and Revelation through em, Gabriel had caught glimpses of strange, terrible things. Ey saw twisted beings of shadow, like the warped Malakh but smaller, and a place of agony, at the heart of which lay a cage. Ey saw vicious creatures, amorphous and rapacious, devouring the nascent Universe until the creation of the Malakhim disrupted their feast long enough that they could be purged and locked away Elsewhere. Ey saw creatures walking on two limbs and draped in the woven fibers of plants. Ey saw eir little charge wearing one of those creatures in much the same way that the creatures wore the woven fibers; saw the way the green-eyed one watched. Ey saw constructs of gleaming metal rolling on flat, paved paths or rising on pillars of shaped flame for the stars._

 _Gabriel still wasn't sure if all of what ey had seen would come to pass (or if it had really happened, in the case of the world-eaters), but it was enough to make em want to savor the peace the Host was enjoying— who knew if it would last?_

 _The sound of wings much larger than eir charge's drew Gabriel from eir thoughts, but ey quickly relaxed at the sight of twin, sandy-hued spans._ **Gabriel!** _Balthazar called, folding eir wings with a snappy flourish._ **Have I got a story for you, Messenger.**

 _The last and smallest of the Malakhim born from the second Sundering, Balthazar was also the last of those to be Named while the One still spoke through Gabriel. For all eir diminutive size, ey was bold and cheeky— Gabriel would not soon forget the casual swagger with which ey had greeted the One's Naming touch. Assigned to the ranks of the Ishim, who were the smallest and most nimble of the Host, Balthazar exemplified the quick wit and creativity that the rank demanded. To Raphael the Healer ey was little more than a troublemaker, but Gabriel liked the little Ish, not the least because ey was so kind a friend to eir charge._

 **Oh?** _It went without saying that a smug Balthazar meant_ something _amusing had happened. Moreover, ey and Gabriel shared both their sense of justice and their sense of humor— no doubt there was a deservedly aggrieved Malakh somewhere in the Haven. Gabriel loved very little more than deservedly aggrieved Malakhim, especially when there was a good chance the Malakh in question was Zachariah._

 **Zachariah threw me out of lessons again,** _Balthazar replied, confirming Gabriel's suspicions. Balthazar did so adore the combined reward of a hassled Zachariah and ejection from the teaching circles all of the youngest Malakhim were being forced to attend._

 _Were any other Malakhim present, Gabriel might have made an effort to seem superficially disappointed, but in the presence of only eir little one and the Ish, ey made no attempt hide eir amusement. Ey had always found the teaching circles a waste of time, but once the Emissary's appearance had seemed to confirm the weird religion that had developed around the One, there had been no dissuading the smaller Malakhim (or Raphael, for that matter). Disrupting them was a wonderful pastime._ **You took my advice, didn't you?** _ey chuckled._ **Let me guess. Ey took it poorly.**

 _In lieu of an answer, Balthazar's curls, fronts, and wings puffed up with mock outrage._ **What! Such impudence!** _ey spluttered in a cascade of histrionic, whining twists._ **How** _ **dare**_ **you! I am** _ **important.**_ **I am a** _ **Seraph**_ **and I know** _ **everything**_ **and** _ **you**_ **are just an Ish! Raphael will hear of this!**

 _Gabriel cackled. Ey could very easily imagine the oily, pompous Seraph reacting in such a way. Seraphim were the taskmasters and overseers of the ranks of smaller Malakhim, and while most of them were merely boring, Zachariah seemed to take as much pleasure in having others to boss around as ey took in sucking up to Gabriel, Raphael, Michael the Largest, and Samael the Lightbringer. How ey had inherited such an unpleasant nature from Gabriel's lost sibling was anyone's guess; the Lost One had been quiet and humble, not at all like the blustering, smallest remnant from the first Sundering. As such, Gabriel shamelessly relished every opportunity to directly or remotely goad the arrogant Seraph into embarrassing emself._

 _Better yet were the chances to do so where ey could witness the resulting fit of wounded self-importance, or be privy to a first-hand account of the event._ **Ey's moved on to Raphael, now, has ey?**

 **Michael was 'busy',** _Balthazar sniggered._

 _Gabriel had to laugh at that. If Michael's complaints to Samael and Gabriel about Zachariah's frequent 'reports' were anything to judge by, the largest Malakh had probably reached the end of eir patience and reserved one low-priority task or another for just such a purpose. Clever ruses aside, however, Michael was still Michael, and Gabriel didn't doubt that eir presentation of the excuse was painfully obvious._

 _Down by the fish, Gabriel's little charge's wings opened with a surprised snap! as a particularly ungainly flop brought it almost within touching distance. The motion caught Balthazar's attention, and the sandy-winged Ish sidled over to get a look at the source of the startlement._

 **Eugh,** _said Balthazar after a moment of watching._ **'Love all creatures great and small' is all well and good, but that is** _ **ugly.**_ **What is it?**

 **A fish,** _Gabriel replied temperately, ignoring the commentary that a certain seraph would undoubtedly find blasphemous. It was not beautiful to look upon— that was fact. Ey seriously doubted that the One particularly cared what the Malakhim thought, so long as they did their duty by protecting the creatures._

 _Starry wings flexed thoughtfully as Gabriel's charge gazed down at the fish, up at Balthazar, over at Gabriel, and then back to the fish again._ **Well, it's an ugly fish,** _Balthazar persisted, and one of those little, dark wings raised up, up—_

 _A gentle, too-familiar touch against Gabriel's mind was all it took._

 **Don't step on that fish, Castiel,** _ey said, and the little wing furled itself away as tiny Castiel looked up at Gabriel curiously. It took all of eir effort to maintain an image of relaxed calm and amusement in the face of the Revelation ey had just been dealt._ **Big plans for that fish.**

 _Sadly, ey watched Castiel and Balthazar go back to watching the fish's awkward progress. It would improve, Gabriel knew now. It would walk on four legs, and multiply, and the gift of thought would slowly bloom within its line. Soon it would walk on two, and then there would be metal constructs, and two-leg creatures draped in woven fibers, and some would have green eyes._

 _There would be Malakhim wearing those creatures the way the One wore the Emissary- more importantly, eir Castiel would be there, blue-eyed and caught up in a strange world._

 _Without knowing why or how they had come to meet, though, Gabriel could only hope that the green-eyed one would be good to little Castiel._


	10. Chapter 10

Season's greetings, everyone.

I can't begin to apologize enough. Work and health these past three months have been... demanding, for lack of a better word. The surgery in early November to fix my illness was successful, so no more ER visits or being homebound with agonizing pain (yay!), but some of the permanent aftereffects have been challenging to cope with, especially with a month and a half of wall-to-wall business travel. Hopefully I'll be able to focus more on my health and my writing now that work has hit a quiet period.

I hope this one's a good read. Thank you so much for sticking with me through all of this. :)

* * *

 _Castiel had never imagined that Malakhim could be so enormous._

 **And you say you found it on the third sphere?** _demanded the violet one, thrusting a hard-edged wing at Castiel. It was less like being pointed at and more like being lunged at by a small continent; Castiel skittered away from the accusing expanse in alarm._ **It's not right. It runs away!**

 **If I could stand seven thousand of myself end to end and still not span half the breadth of the being shoving eir wings at me, I might run away also,** _the scarlet Malakh, easily the largest of the three, replied with mild disdain. Eir scarlet wings ruffled in a shrug._ **At any rate, I had heard much of the third sphere's beauty, so I wished to witness it myself. Instead, I found this little one braving ash and cold and fire to preserve what was left of the living things on the land and in the sea.**

 _Castiel curled in on emself a bit at the unhappy reminder and gazed sadly at the featureless, static void surrounding them. Too much had happened, and ey had been pulled away far too early— if only ey knew how to escape this place!_

 _From the moment of eir birth on a velvet bed of moss, ey had known the third sphere as home and as Paradise. The land shivered with verdancy, tall ferns and woody plants all clamoring for sunlight as fungi and bryophytes claimed the shade and the earth beneath their canopies. The oceans and lakes were prismatic gardens of corals, plants, and algae. Animals prowled the understory, wandered the plains, took to the skies, burrowed in the earth; some made the blistering heat of the desert their own and others filled the gardens of the lakes and seas. Some were large and some were small; some had legs, some had fins, some had wings, and still others had none of those things at all. There were scales and hides and eyes and ears, fluttering antennae and bristling spines, drifting threads full of vicious, tiny stingers and waving tentacles, soft bodies and hard plating, bones and shells… everywhere Castiel had looked, there had been something new and amazing to discover._

 _For many, many cycles of seasons— years, Gabriel called them during those golden days when ey and Balthazar had walked the sphere with Castiel— the world had been eir wonderland._

 _That had ended with the onset of the time of dying._

 _It had begun with volcanic eruptions, but not the typical sort involving mountains that built themselves from their own ejecta. Instead, the molten rock had poured forth and covered the land as a flood, burning and burying all in its path, and it had simply kept flowing forth. Castiel had been able to rescue many of the living things near the eruptive zone, but as years had passed, the zone had grown, and Castiel had been forced to make more and more trips to extract living things for placement elsewhere. Years more passed, and then the weather soured— the gases released by the eruption, laden with oxidized sulphur, had spread throughout the atmosphere and begun to exert an insidious, relentless cooling influence on temperatures across the sphere. An ashy haze had filled the sky, dimming the sun and exacerbating the cooling effect further still. There had been little to nothing Castiel could do when plants and then animals began to sicken and die— ey was powerful, yes, but ey was not powerful enough to stop the flow of gases or filter the ash from the air of an entire world._

 _The killing blow had fallen in the form of a chunk of leftover debris from the formation of the spheres— a meteor. Others had impacted in the past, devastating the areas immediately surrounding their impact sites but generally causing no larger problems. This meteor, however, had been large, nearly ten times Castiel's size, and heavy. With no ices to burn off as it approached the warm Sun, it had been virtually undetectable from the surface until it pierced the atmosphere, and by the time Castiel had understood what it was and fled the sphere's surface, it had impacted. Tremors had shaken the planet, and the floods of molten rock redoubled in the wake of the trauma; the ocean had risen up in a towering ring from the impact and drowned entire coastlines when it made landfall. A cloud of dust and debris had been thrown up so high that material crashed down entire continents away from the impact site, and the matter too lightweight to fall immediately had obscured the skies even further. It had been a grievous setback, but ey had not been deterred— ey would not let life die out without a fight._

 _When Castiel had been plucked from the surface by the vast, scarlet Malakh, the plants, fungi, and animals ey had rescued had been stable, but only just. At eir last count, ey had estimated that nearly eighty percent of all living things had been eradicated by the devastating chain of events._

 _Ey still wasn't sure if life would make it. Ey hoped it would, but the sentiment was just that and little else— hope._

 _Violet pulsed with distress, dragging Castiel from eir thoughts, and turned a pleading front on the third Malakh._ **You know what it is!** _ey hissed, jabbing again and drawing another flinch from Castiel._

 **I do,** _said the third, and flicked a quelling wing. Quite without warning, Castiel found emself behind the vast, scarlet Malakh, quivering with an inexplicable terror as the sight of that savagely bright wing echoed in eir mind._

 _Ignoring the noise of warning from the violet one, the vast, scarlet Malakh curved the smallest of eir wings around Castiel with utmost gentleness. Its span, small compared to the rest, still left Castiel utterly dwarfed in its curl._ **What is your name, little starry one?** _the vast one asked._ **I am Michael; the One is my strength.**

 _Castiel didn't understand what the last part of that meant, but ey recognized the name._ **Michael! You are Gabriel's sibling.**

 _Whatever response Michael may have had for Castiel was lost under the messy thunderclap of outrage that the violet one produced._ **This explains it all!** _ey cried, currents whirling and sputtering._ **Ey _kept_ it! **_Turning on the searing one, ey fixed em with an accusing gyre._ **You _said_ you would _destroy_ it, not give it away!**

 **I was stopped,** _the searing one remarked coolly,_ **and then I was rebuked by the One. Ey is not to be harmed.**

 **But—**

 **But nothing,** _the searing one interjected._ **Eir old influence is gone. Moreover, the One has spoken on the matter. We are not to harm em, and that is the end of it.**

 _The violet one was not satisfied._ **That does not mean we cannot restrain it, or limit it! You say its influence is gone, but I beg to differ! Did you not hear Michael's report that it has _changed the course of events_ on the third sphere? That is hardly a 'lack of influence', as you say!**

 _With that, Castiel came to the sudden realization that the violet one's 'it' was referring to em._ **I was doing my duty.** _Ey backed emself a little further into Michael's wing when all three enormous Malakhim focused in on em, but ey kept eir own small, equally numerous wings held with conviction._ **When I was born, Gabriel taught me. 'We are Malakhim, and Malakhim observe, understand, and protect all things great and small within the Universe the One created'.**

 _The violet Malakh's splatter of dismissal was not surprising. Michael and the searing one, however, exchanged a series of subtle, thoughtful arrangements that ended with Michael gently scooping Castiel up once again._

 **Gabriel is correct, little one— you are a Malakh, and Malakhim have a duty to the Universe. You did what you understood your duty to be, and I am impressed by the impact of your efforts. However, Raphael also has a point— though we have our duty, we must not influence the natural unfolding of events unduly.** _Gripping Castiel snugly, Michael flexed eir vast wings; if the violet one protested, the sound was lost in the thunder of titanic wingbeats._ **I will deliver you to Zachariah, who is a teacher among us. We could use a Malakh as willing to work as you, little one, and would be glad to welcome you into the Host.**

 _Warmed though ey was by Michael's compliments, Castiel could not help but feel conflicted. For one thing, ey vaguely recalled some sort of conversation between Gabriel and Balthazar regarding a Zachariah. Had it been a negative one? Ey remembered laughter, but it had been so early in eir life that the memory was muddled by how overwhelmed ey had been by the world. Had it been good laughter? Was it good that ey was being sent to this Zachariah?_

 _Perhaps most importantly, the violet Malakh— Raphael, ey assumed— had been startlingly hostile toward em, and never once referred to em like another Malakh. Ey seemed to be convinced that Castiel had some greater history, too, which was bizarre in and of itself. Castiel had been born, had lived, and now had been plucked from eir home and deposited in some too-silent, too-blank place; confused though eir early memories were, ey suspected ey would remember whatever this was that Raphael had been going on about. What was this 'old influence', and what had all that talk of destruction been? Why was ey protected by the One, and why had Raphael seemed to expect the searing one to support em?_

 _Why had Castiel been so afraid of the searing one, when ey had never encountered em before in eir life?_

 _Unless ey could find Gabriel or escape from this place, however, Castiel could not be certain that ey would be safe from Raphael. Ey would have to play along until then._

 **Thank you, Michael,** _ey said, pulsating gratitude for Michael's protection and allowing the vast, scarlet Malakh to make of it what ey would._ **I would be honored, and I will do my best to learn.**

* * *

 **… naturally, Seraphim such as myself are wise instructors and coordinators as well as fierce warriors, trusted with the guidance and direction of smaller Malakhim. I, of course, exemplify the—**

 _For just an instant, Zachariah's six wings and ruddy Grace were gilded by a nova of reflected light; bare moments later, a deafening roar shook Haven itself with fury._

 _It did not matter that the words within the roar were unintelligible; even twisted with uncontrolled emotion, Castiel would recognize that voice anywhere._ **Gabriel!** _ey cried, taking off without bothering to ask Zachariah for permission. Ey had never heard such fear or anger in Gabriel's harmonics before. It was probably pointless to call— Gabriel's roar still reverberated around the Haven, all but drowning out any other sounds— but ey called nonetheless, throwing all of emself into it to the point that it felt almost like a reach—_

— **Cassie?!**

 _Castiel did falter then, so startled was ey by the sudden presence of Gabriel's voice. Ey was not hearing it— all of Haven still trembled with that unending roar— yet it was crystal clear in eir consciousness and absolutely throbbing with panic. Ey grabbed onto the feeling of it and beat eir wings with renewed determination._ **Gabriel! What's happened? Are you hurt?!**

 _Gabriel's roar stuttered and broke off._ **Where are you?! Where have you been?!**

 _No sooner had Castiel taken in eir surroundings (still blank and featureless, to eir senses) than ey was cocooned in sunlight wings and Grace. Gabriel was shaking around em, to the point where eir coils tangled with one another in eir desperate scramble to examine every last part of Castiel's being._ **Gabriel, what is—** _Castiel tried, only putting up a token protest before opening eir wings for an insistent gyre._ **Gabriel?** _Concern cut a chill path through eir currents when Gabriel gave no indication of even hearing em._ **Gabriel. Tell me what's happening. You're frightening me.**

 _The inspection was abandoned without warning, and Gabriel's shaking wings closed around Castiel with terrible gentleness._ **I. Cassie, you— you were _gone_ , **_ey croaked, speaking fronts wrecked by emotion._

 _Castiel pressed eir wings along the nearest of those fronts as closely as eir individual recursions would allow. Ey barely covered any of it, never mind the rest of Gabriel (and there was a lot more of em than ey remembered there being), but it seemed to help nonetheless; the currents of Grace running wildly beneath eir wings began to calm._ **I am here. I am safe,** _ey said, aloud and through that strange connection that still quivered in eir mind._ **I am here.**

 _They hung there entwined, Castiel singing and pouring comfort into eir guardian as Gabriel's currents slowly, slowly regained eir steady, placid flow, but it was slow— too slow. Ey could understand fear for eir safety, but this was a level of distress totally disproportionate to the situation. Ey had only been alone on the third sphere for some four thousand years before Michael found em, and though Haven did not enjoy seasons, the third sphere had been without them for over two thousand of those, so ey had gauged with confidence that ey had been suffering Zachariah's 'tutelage' for perhaps six thousand years, bringing their time of separation to about ten thousand total._

 _When arranged for significant streamlining in the flow of time, ten thousand years could be stretched to feel like a tremendously long interval— life existed in such a configuration, for instance, and Zachariah's self-congratulatory lectures had a similar effect without actually changing one's chronodynamics— but even within the scale of Castiel's lifetime, it was but a brief moment. Gabriel was considerably older, so why was ey so distraught over a moment of separation when they had been apart for as long as one or two_ million _years in the past?_

 **Gabriel,** _Castiel said gently,_ **will you explain this fear? We have only been apart ten thousand years.**

 _As soon as the words had left eir fronts, Castiel knew something wasn't right. Gabriel's fronts had gone still with shock even as eir currents roared back into a frenzy._ **That. That makes no sense, Cassie.**

 _Castiel signaled eir confusion._ **What does not? Time is time, even if Zachariah's lessons stretch it beyond anything I thought possible. Ten thousand years have passed; I have tracked it.**

 _Gabriel's currents were truly racing now, but it was not the fear of before— rather, it was something Castiel had no words for, a sense of 'something is not right' laced with 'danger' and 'someone has made this happen for a reason'. All but one of eir gyres had withdrawn, moving outward to scan their surrounds._ **I believe you,** _ey said, distracted,_ **but… I did not search for you** _ **that** _**long.**

 _Ey gave Castiel no time to feel hurt at that statement._ **Cassie, I have been searching for over _fifty_ _million years_.**

 _Castiel stared, too shocked to respond. Ey checked the positioning of eir six major wings in time's currents and then checked eir core rhythms and loss rates against that value, but everything was as it had been for the last seven or eight thousand years. Michael could have done something in transit, perhaps, but Castiel would have known if ey had altered their positioning in the flow of time— an increase in the rate of energy loss from eir wings of that magnitude would have been impossible to miss. Finally, there were no gaps in eir memory._ **Gabriel, that's not possible.**

 _A laugh left Gabriel, but there was no mirth in it._ **It's very possible, Cassie, and you know what?**

 **What?**

 _Golden wings beat with a sound like thunder around them._ **We are not going to be a part of this. I'm leaving, and I'm taking you with me.**

 _Castiel offered no protest at that._ **Zachariah will be angry.**

 **Even better. Never did like that guy.**

* * *

 _Even with Gabriel furled back down into the familiar, only-slightly-larger scale that Castiel knew so well, they had understood that they would eventually be located. There were too many factors playing against them for their freedom to last, but that did not dissuade Gabriel from working hard to wring as much time as possible out of their escape._ **Zach'll feed you dogma until the One returns, but ey won't teach you anything useful. We need time, because there's a lot you need to learn,** _Gabriel had said as they'd tumbled down a bizarre tunnel of bent space beyond Haven's gate._

 _Both of them had left glaring trails upon leaving that tunnel, caught off-guard by the abrupt pressure of time against their wings, but Gabriel had anticipated as much and come to a workable solution. Rather than attempting to simply flee as far and fast as possible, ey had taken Castiel on a super-chronodynamic, high-speed tour of the rest of the system so looping and roundabout that even Castiel had experienced difficulty discerning where they had gone at what point. In the space of approximately half a third-sphere year, they visited every last sphere, every last moon orbiting said spheres, and even several of the rocky bodies that were too small to assume a spheroid shape. Then, once that was done, they did it again in a totally different order, and then one more time in yet another order, just to be particularly thorough._

 _Castiel hadn't derived quite so much enjoyment out of watching the patrols of smaller Malakhim get hopelessly lost trying to follow their trail as Gabriel had, but ey had certainly filed away the usefulness of the tactic._

 _Gabriel, it seemed, was positively overflowing with such strategies and ploys. Not all of the ones ey came up with worked, but the ones that did, ey repeated and refined to the point that Castiel could recreate them with a little precision and effort despite eir considerably smaller pool of available energy. For instance, a particular inscribed, two-dimensional shape charged with enough Grace could be induced to resonate, and that resonance could produce some very interesting effects. Some shapes barred Malakhim from passing; others hid objects from visibility. One even sent Malakhim within a certain radius flying away and rendered the area un-findable for a short period of time, though Castiel and Gabriel strove to avoid using that one too much- splitting up was far too risky._

 _Perhaps the most awe-inspiring works that Gabriel performed were the illusions— three-dimensional structures of channelled Grace that, though initially simple and intended to distract purely by way of being utterly novel, grew in both complexity and realism until Gabriel was mimicking other Malakhim with eerie verisimilitude. These, however, gained an additional use during the quiet times when their pursuers were well and truly lost._

 **This one is important, Cassie,** _Gabriel said as the image of a tiny, upright creature strode across puddles and stone to stand before Castiel. It stared up at em with its long, grasping limbs crossed over the ventral portion of its upper torso and fearlessness in its two green eyes._ **I don't know why yet, but ey'll travel with you in the future- the One didn't leave much doubt about that.**

 _Castiel brought eir gyres down to the image's level for a closer examination. Its hide was bizarre, a baggy, many-layered affair that didn't match the warm, pale hue or ruddy speckles of its facial hide. Fine, dusty brown bristles sprouted from the top and sides of its head, as well as from the ridges over its eyes, and the skin surrounding its mouth opening was rosy and supple. Its legs, baggy-skinned and dull blue, ended in dark, round, flattened stubs— perhaps adapted for its upright posture?— and bowed outward somewhat at the middle joint. For all that it looked strange and wholly unsuited to survival (how did it avoid predators with such loose, graspable skin and so few spines? Was it venomous?), it also seemed sturdy and well-suited to fast, land-based movement if its long legs were any indicator._ **What is it?**

 **Ey, Cassie. Ey's a thinking being, not a thing, and ey and eir kin are descendants of a particular line of creatures on the third sphere. In fact, this one's descended from the fish you very nearly smashed.**

 _Castiel felt a flush of guilt at that._ **I never realized—**

 **We rarely do,** _said Gabriel, gentle and patient._ **I had to be told.**

 _Absently signaling understanding, Castiel tipped a gyre closer to the creature's face._ **Its… _eir_ eyes are so green.**

 _Gabriel agreed, dispelling the image._ **It's unusual even for that species. You'll see that, someday, I promise, but we've gotta move on for now.**

 _Golden and starry wings beat in concert as Gabriel and Castiel lifted off from the cloudy surface of the ringed giant's largest moon._ **Will you show me again?** _Castiel queried once they were well on their way. If ey was to travel with the baggy-skinned, green-eyed creature, ey wanted to understand em._

 **Next time we stop, kiddo,** _was Gabriel's reply._

 _Castiel turned the memory of the image over in eir mind._ **I can wait,** _ey said, and wondered at those green, green eyes._

* * *

 **That wasn't one of ours,** _Gabriel hissed over the mental link that had never quite faded. They had learned from experience that, while the tempestuous carbon-seas of the outer cloud-giants would mask their individual hums and refract their lights past recognizability, the unnatural starts and stops of speech were all too obvious. It was the mental link or nothing._

 _Castiel powered eir wings through the searing, viscous fluid— staying abreast of eir guardian in the mighty currents was difficult for em, given how much smaller ey was._ **It had to happen at some point; the barrier-shapes were the ones we had to leave behind most often.** _Darting around a berg of solid carbon, ey reached out with a coil and latched on to one of Gabriel's, tugging emself in and huddling under the sheltering wing that came around to meet em._ **We should expect to encounter the others eventually.**

 _Sunny grace twisted with resignation._ **I don't want to say you're right, but… you're right, Cassie.**

 _It was not enjoyable to see Gabriel so defeated. With all of Gabriel's clever ruses and Castiel's developing sense of strategy, they had bought themselves nearly two hundred million years of time, enough that Gabriel had been able to pass on everything ey knew, from the Beginning through the disappearance of the thing Between and up to Castiel's birth._ **We accomplished all of your goals, Gabriel.** _Thanks to Gabriel's tutelage, Castiel knew more than a dozen resonant-shapes and their effects— something, ey suspected, that would be needed in the future. Ey knew the mechanisms of shaping mass and energy, even if ey wasn't powerful enough to do as much as Gabriel could, and ey knew the bodies of humans like the structure of eir own currents. Ey knew that ey would walk with a green-eyed human and a shining black construct of iron, silicon, and carbon, someday. They had even made a visit to the third sphere, staying just long enough for Castiel to confirm what ey had seen during their earlier fly-bys: a green and blue world full of thriving living things._ **There have been no failures.**

 **Yeah, but now we're just gonna get dragged back,** _Gabriel grumbled._ **Some happy ending.** _A different berg of solid-carbon went spinning off with a petulant flick of a golden coil._

 _Castiel sighed._ **Then we should not get dragged back.** _Ey felt Gabriel preparing to protest and raised a wing to forestall em._ **I don't mean evade capture. That, as you have said, is an inevitability. I mean that we should return on our own terms.**

 **You're not seriously suggesting that we just _go back,_** _Gabriel said, incredulous._

 **I am suggesting exactly that. You have proven that Malakhim struggle with novelty. Given the long-standing trend of escape behavior we have established, a deviation from that will be unexpected, and allow us to dictate the terms of engagement.**

 _Gabriel looked impressed._ **Remind me never to get on your bad side, Cassie.**

 **But Malakhim do not have sides,** _Castiel protested lightly, despite knowing full well what Gabriel's figure of speech meant._ **And if I did have sides, how would I know which one was the bad one?**

 _A strange quiet came over Gabriel briefly, as if ey were listening to a voice only ey could hear, but then sorrow-tinged amusement rippled over eir currents._ **Oh, my little one,** _Gabriel laughed sadly._ _The rest of eir wings and gyres crowded in close, drawing Castiel as near as their structures would allow._ **Oh, my good, starry-winged Castiel. Someday, we'll meet as brothers, and you'll remind me what it means to have courage. You're going to be so strong, kid. You'll question, and rise, and fall, and there'll be pain, Cassie, so much pain, but you'll find your answers and your faith yourself, and then there'll be a day when you rise up again, made whole— that I know, Cassie. That I know.**

 _Castiel wrapped eir wings around Gabriel's in an attempt to soothe away the sorrow— no, the grief— that was suddenly coruscating through all of Gabriel's furled being. Where had that mirth gone? What was this… this speech, and this mourning?_ ** _I don't understand._**

 **You will,** _Gabriel promised._ **Now— are you ready to bend Zachariah utterly out of shape?**

 _Ey was confused and worried, but ey suspected this was one of those times when Gabriel simply couldn't answer eir questions. Ey readied eir major wings and pushed a bit of extra bravado through eir currents._ **Am I ready to aggravate the most self-aggrandizing Malakh in the Universe? You truly have to ask?**

 **Consider it an invitation to imagine the possibilities,** _Gabriel returned with an arch twist of a front._

 _It was forced humor, but in the face of so much uncertainty, Castiel could not begrudge eir guardian the crutch._

* * *

 **This must be a big one,** _Balthazar mused, both sandy wings half-unfurled. Like Anael and Uriel, ey had wings and gyres trained on the distant, tight huddle of the four Chayot— Gabriel, Michael, Samael, and Raphael— and the eighteen Seraphim._ **They're almost never clustered like this for so long.**

 **Do you think the One will send the Emissary?** _Anael wondered aloud. Her morning-blue wings shivered with anticipation._ **I overheard Michael and Samael, once— they said that It had been so vast that It filled all the space between the stars.**

 **I was told that It came to them in the guise of the fifth Chayah,** _Uriel chimed in._

 _Castiel didn't have anything to offer eir chaperones; though Gabriel had spoken of the One and the Emissary, ey had never described it. Vague impressions had echoed through their connection when They were mentioned, like a sense of not-alone-ness or the memory of a single, thunderous, perfect sound, but there had been no real descriptions to go on. Those impressions, however, had been enough that Castiel knew they would be very, very aware of it if the One or Its Emissary made an appearance. They were not the sort one could miss, no matter Their guise._

 _Blazing-bright wings snapped outward without warning from the cluster, scattering a few Seraphim like motes of dust in their wake._ **I will not do it!** _Samael bellowed. Ey tore emself away when Michael attempted to draw em into a comforting embrace._ **I refuse! We are light and will and power, and they rose from mud!**

 **Samael, it's what the One wants,** _Gabriel said; Castiel only heard em because of their mental link._ **They're creators, and they have free will. Does it really matter what they're made of, or how long they live, or how big or small they are?**

 _Samael's response was not audible, but disgust was so plain on eir wings and fronts that it could be seen like a beacon from Castiel's vantage point. Samael's attention went between Michael and Raphael— the two were speaking to em, perhaps?— before the disgust in eir arrangement tipped with sudden violence into hatred._ **The One favors _them_ , does Ey? **_ey sneered, whipping eir wings open to take in all of Haven._ **We devoted ourselves to the One as the One bade us, despite death and darkness and neglect, and now?** _ey thundered, loud enough that surely all of Haven could hear em._ **Now** **Ey demands our _obeisance_ , not to Em, but to eir _favorites_ — animals, born of and wriggling about in mud!**

 **What?** _Anael asked of the others, lost. All around, the shocked whispers and cries of the rest of the Host began to fill Haven's blank expanse._ **What is ey talking about?**

 _Uriel looked thunderstruck; Balthazar scoffed._ **That's ridiculous. The One doesn't play favorites.**

 _Michael was saying something now, even as Gabriel's wings began to slowly, slowly shift into a defensive arrangement, tensed for violence or flight. Castiel wished ey could be there, ready to fight or flee at eir guardian's side._ **They're talking about the humans,** _ey said, to answer Anael._ **Thinking animals on the third sphere.**

 **Thinking _animals?_** _Uriel said, shaken from eir silence by disdain._ **That isn't possible. They're mere elegant toys at most— a bunch of looped chemical reactions in carbon lumps.**

 _Castiel restrained emself from snapping at the other Malakh. Ey did not like to hear anyone speak ill of the living things on the third sphere._ **It is perfectly possible— they have energy currents that run in beds anchored in matter. I was not able to determine whether it was the matter that shaped the cur—**

 **I don't care about that,** _Uriel cut in._ **How can they have currents if they have no Grace? It simply isn't possible.**

 _Castiel's answer was drowned out by a shockwave of sound and light that sent all four of them tumbling. It took all six of Castiel's primary wings to right emself in the gale and to help Uriel, Balthazar, and Anael, and when they could finally search for the source of the tempest, all speech was stolen by horror._

 _Distant and terrible, Michael and Samael were locked in combat._

 _None could look away from the sight of Malakh fighting Malakh— of Chayah fighting Chayah— so when Raphael swooped in on angled, violet wings to whisk Castiel away, it was far too late to react._

* * *

 **This is your doing, isn't it?** _Raphael asked, cold as the empty space around them._

 _Castiel said nothing._

 **You corrupted Gabriel, twisted em until ey was your puppet, and drove em to split the Host, didn't you?**

 _The blue-winged Seraph Raphael had brought reached into Castiel's Grace, displacing fronts with callous disregard. Still, Castiel said nothing. Ey would not give them the satisfaction._

 **No matter,** _Raphael sighed._ **Your puppet has vanished, Samael is locked away, and Michael no longer cares. I cannot kill you— the One's Word is final— but I can ensure that you never cause us harm again.**

 _The blue Seraph's reaching gyre closed around the tight, filigree helices and toroids that carried Castiel's memories._

 **Gabriel, forgive me,** _Castiel wept into the silence of the mental link._

 _Even when the grip turned to tearing, ey made no sound._

* * *

 **Castiel?**

 _Castiel gazed dazedly upon the blue-winged Seraph hovering over em. Eir mind rang with thousands of voices that were not eir own, making it difficult to think, but ey was quite sure that nothing at all was familiar._ **Who are you?**

 _For some reason, that pleased the Seraph._ **I am Naomi,** _ey said, and patted one of Castiel's two wings (two?) with a reassuring gyre._ **You were hurt, Castiel. Do you remember anything?**

 _Ey tried to recall what had come before, but…_ **Green…?** _ey ventured, hesitant._ **I remember green.** _Ey was still distracted by the voices, and the sight of eir two wings, and kept gazing back and forth between those and Naomi's own pale blue sets._ **I… what have I forgotten?** _What was this strange, aching space within em, like something absent? What were these voices that were never silent?_

 **Much,** _Naomi said._ **Do you remember your rank, Castiel?**

 _Castiel stared, uncomprehending. Rank?_

 **What about your duties?** _Naomi pressed._ **Your mission? It was very important; surely you remember that?**

 _Panic began to seep into eir currents as Castiel struggled to recall._ **I… I was…**

 **This is troubling,** _Naomi murmured, just barely audible, and Castiel's panic redoubled._ **Castiel, you must remember— you are a Malakh. We were made by the One to obey; how can you to help us do that if you cannot remember?** _Six blue wings spread and propelled Naomi away._ **Wait here. I will have to ask Michael and Raphael how to proceed.**

 _Michael and Raphael— those were names Castiel remembered. Ey remembered Malakhim so large they defied comprehension; more importantly, ey remembered witnessing them casting out the Lightbringer when ey failed to obey, tearing at those searing wings before locking em away forever. What would they do to Castiel, if they had so decisively cast out a Malakh of such immensity and beauty?_

 _Eir two wings were uncooperative and clumsy as ey scrambled to waylay Naomi's flight._ **I can learn!** _ey cried, desperate._ **I will learn, Naomi! Teach me, and I will obey!**

 _Naomi slowed eir flight enough that Castiel was able to catch up._ **I must ask for orders,** _ey said, hesitant, but Castiel could see that Naomi was looking em over carefully._

 **Let me prove myself,** _Castiel offered._ **I can earn my place within the Host, Naomi— I can be the Malakh I once was. Teach me, and I will prove it.**

 _Naomi's examination stretched on and on._

 _At length, pity flickered along a blue-tinged front._ **I am making an extraordinary exception for you, Castiel. Do not disappoint me; I can't protect you from Michael or Raphael if you cannot keep up appearances.**

 **I will keep up,** _Castiel vowed._ **Tell me what I must do.**

* * *

 _Hell was deep and terrible._

 _Still, Castiel pressed on. Eir garrison had been charged with storming Hell and retrieving the Righteous Man, and so they would storm Hell and retrieve the Righteous Man. There was no questioning so vital a mission._

 _One after the other, the angels under Castiel's command were torn from the acrid air, planes lashed by reaching tentacles or gyres snagged by filthy, hooked claws. Lucifer was no doubt pleased by eir vile handiwork, twisting the souls of God's prized children into hateful mockeries of Creation, weapons that could be sent out to continue to corrupt and to destroy. It was the ultimate revenge, the deepest insult- ripping the Host from Heaven and life, warping God's Work._

 _Castiel banked hard to avoid something that writhed under a coat of corrosive ooze; behind em, eir last lieutenant was not so fortunate._

 _Ey was alone._

 _Ey would not fail._

 _Powering eir wings, Castiel poured emself into reaching deeper into Hell, outracing the wretched beings reaching and clawing for em from all sides, until finally, finally, ey saw-_

 _\- green._

 _There, in the depths of Hell, ey saw green, and when ey reached out, it was with an arm, a hand, and as ey clutched the battered, verdant soul, furled it deep into eir Grace against Hell's reaching claws, something strange passed through eir mind with the memory of speckled skin and green eyes._

 **You have been strong,** _ey said to the green soul without knowing why, and brought eir two wings down with all the might of eighteen._ **You have been strong through so much pain, and though you questioned, though you have fallen, have faith- this is the day when you will rise up again, made whole.** _Down eir wings beat again; demons fell away screaming in the tempest they stirred._ **Dean Winchester is saved,** _ey said, to the soul and to the Host at large._ **This I know.** **  
** **  
** ** _Dean Winchester is saved._**


	11. Chapter 11

Hi, y'all. It's... been a bad year. I'm so, so sorry about the delay. January through August was wall-to-wall merger activity, complications from gallbladder removal, and getting no help in dealing with a really toxic, manipulative, scam artist of a coworker (who actually turned out to be potentially toxic to the whole damn company, but that's another story for another time). Dealing with all that culminated in hospitalization in September for severe anxiety and stage three burnout, and most of the time since then has been recovery. I'm doing a lot better, now, and I'm glad to finally be in a place where I can *create* things again.

I wanna give a shout out to AKF and YANA. They literally saved my life on Sept 9, zero hyperbole- 'I am enough, I am not alone, and I will always keep fighting' got me to the ER and through the darkest, scariest, most hopeless place I've ever been in. I cannot express how grateful I am for everything they've done.

Thanks again for reading, y'all. :hugs, if you like them:

Q

* * *

He opens his eyes to warmth and a soft blue something pressing against him. He's moving, a steady swaying, and there is a foggy smudge of voices. There might be words in there somewhere.

The blue thing's warm press seems to seep through his whole body, soothing, but it's not the right light, not the right shape— not the one that pulled him free.

"Css," he tries to say, naming the right-shape he remembers, but the dim, close quiet of tired is rising up over his head again, and his mouth won't form the sounds.

It hurts to breathe. "Suh?" Another right-shape, but not the same kind— fewer ways, flatter but not flat. Still important. More important than the hot-coppery-wet that burbles up and makes its escape from his lips, or the way he spills from himself. Maybe it's the name trying to get out. "Cah. Cas." Metallic wet drips from his mouth with the escaping right-sound; part of him slips from the not-right-shape's hold and dangles limply, dripping.

A voice speaks to him, but the words remain a smear of noise. The flopping limb is gathered up and tucked back where it came from.

Dark pulls him down for a while.

* * *

 _When it's visible, it's beautiful and terrifying._

 _It looks like someone's taken one of those Hubble pictures and cut a shape out of it, except the shape's some kind of too-many-directions, always-changing mindfuck the size of a goddamn skyscraper. Sometimes the tangled skeins of stars and glowing clouds shift and then there's this burning core of lighting the color of starlight that seems to branch out and into itself to eternity, but more often than not it's just a Gordian space knot hanging there in nothingness._

 _When it's invisible, it's everywhere and it's still terrifying._

 _Like, he can say it's big, but 'big' is a word for shit with boundaries. This thing? Doesn't end. Doesn't have boundaries. There aren't feet or yards or miles because it_ is _feet and yards and miles. It doesn't have up or down or back or forth or left or right because it_ is _all of those directions, and in and out on top of that. How the hell Dean knows that it's still there, he has no idea, but the knowledge is visceral— it is_ everywhere _._

 _The universe twists itself into the space thing again. Starry coils unfurl just enough to bare the lightning at their heart; Dean stares as the bolts twist and spiral around themselves serenely. Something about it feels… familiar, almost, like he's seen it somewhere before._

 **I never meant for this to happen.**

 _Dean startles. "What?"_

 _The space-thing flickers out of sight for a few seconds, then reappears._ **This thing I have wrought upon you,** _it says, lightning coiling in on itself sadly._ **I could not control my vessel's exit with Bartholomew's instrumentation placed as it was. I have hurt you.**

 _Dean frowns. Vessel? Instrumentation? Bartholo—_

 _— oh._

 _Oh._

 _The needle. The needle Bartholomew had stabbed into Cas, the one Dean had tried to stop._

 _The one his wrist had pressed against just before there had been light (Cas) exploding out and around and through him._

 _He looks at the space-thing again._

 _He's almost afraid to ask, but if there's a chance that it's… that it's him , then he has to. "Cas?"_

 _The space thing doesn't have a mouth, but it still manages to smile._ **Hello, Dean.**

 _Dean's flung himself into Cas before he even realizes he's moved. He only barely stops himself from crying like a baby. "Cas. Jesus, Cas, I thought you were dead." Damn the crazy space shapes and the lightning and the fact that Cas is gi-fucking-normous; it's_ Cas, _and he's_ here _, and he's_ alive _and kind of warm and buzzy, and Dean can't stop his fool mouth any more than he can stop himself trying to figure out hugging his giant-ass, gorgeous, wacked-out-space-lightning thing of an angel. He wants to hold on and never let go. "Cas. Cas. I thought you were dead, Cas, why didn't you say anything, I thought you were gone , Cas, I thought you were gone —"_

 _Cas blips out. Dean flails in the void he leaves behind, panic ratcheting to eleven, but then—_ **I was never gone.** _Cas' voice seems to come from everywhere, even from inside Dean himself._ **I was… outside, but I was never gone.**

 _"You never replied," Dean says into the void. "You never told me you were okay, Cas, I thought you were dead!"_

 _The void flickers; Cas appears again. He brushes Dean's face with a soft, starry curve, and Dean leans into the touch._ **I am alive, Dean, and I wanted to. I didn't know why, at first—I did not remember— but I wanted to.** _He only lasts ten or fifteen seconds before he fades out of sight, but for just a moment after, something in the void shimmers with a familiar blue._ **I was too weak. I could only watch through the eyes of others.**

 _It's like a lightbulb going on in Dean's head. "You were the blue eyes in the painting, and the TV, and the badge—"_

 **I have been with you this whole time, trying to remember.** _Cas says as ey reappears._ **I remember now.**

 _"What?"_

 **I remember what I was,** _Cas replies. He fades out again, even sooner than he had last time._

 _"Cas? Are you okay?"_

 _Cas doesn't reappear immediately._ **I… will be, I think,** _ey says through Dean and the void._ **I remember. It helps.**

 _"You remember being an angel?" Dean asks. "Please come back." He frowns as a strange, claustrophobic feeling comes over him._

 _Cas still doesn't appear._ **I remember,** _ey says, but now he sounds distant, like he's speaking through a tunnel,_ **but now** **I also remember what came** **before** **.**

 _Dean wants to ask what Cas means by 'before', wants to make him reappear and anchor him there where Dean can see him and touch him and know he's okay, but the claustrophobic feeling has grown into a sensation like something's packing him down into a too-small space. "Cas?! Cas, don't go!" He scrabbles and reaches for the retreating void, but it slips through his fingers. "Cas!"_

 _He reaches with everything he is, but the void— Cas— is too distant._

* * *

Dean opens his eyes and looks up at the darkened ceiling of his bedroom.

He tries to move his arm to scrub at his eyes, but it doesn't budge- it's bound to his chest, he realizes, to stabilize his shoulder. Breathing brings with it a horrible, sharp-toothed pain in his ribs on both sides. Finally, when he tries to roll out of bed, he discovers his right leg a) hurts a hell of a lot more than his shoulder or his ribs and b) has been bound up and splinted.

Fan-fucking-tastic.

He's in his bedroom in the Bunker, so that probably means Abaddon didn't win, but it tells him fuck-all about what they lost in beating it back. No one's in the room doing the usual shifts to watch over whoever's hurt the worst, so either he's not the one hurt the worst, or… there's no one who knows the drill left.

"Guys?" he tries calling, but he's hoarse, and the sound doesn't carry well. He tries again, but no one comes.

He waits, cramming all his worries and what-ifs to the back of his head to strain his eyes and ears instead, but no one comes. "Cas?" He looks for flickers of blue, strains to feel that presence from the dream like the universe has grown eyes, but nothing happens.

No one's there.

Just a dream.

"Shit," Dean groans. "Shit, shit, shit."

Slowly, he uses his good leg and good arm to push and drag himself to the edge of the bed. Sitting up is gonna hurt like a bitch, but he's lived through worse, and hell if he's just gonna lie around without information on Sammy or Kevin or anyone. He lowers his left leg to the floor first, getting a good angle, and then uses the momentum from levering his right leg down to pull himself upright.

As soon as his heel hits the floor, some sort of sigil flares to life and races right out of his bedroom door.

Almost immediately afterwards, something huge, glowy, blue, _fast,_ and _definitely not Cas_ comes around the walls.

He doesn't quite get to scream.

* * *

There's glowing, bright blue spaghetti hovering over Dean when he opens his eyes the second time.

 _"Jesus fucking Christ!"_

Adrenaline obliterates pain for an instant; instinctively, Dean lunges away, and rediscovers his bound arm and splinted leg too late to avoid the edge of the bed. He hits the floor and pain explodes fucking _everywhere._ Gasping, he uses his one free arm to drag himself upright. Eyes wide and teeth gritted through the agony and the grating ringing in his ears, he stares over the mattress at the thing still standing at the other bedside.

Whatever it is, the outer edges of the thing look like noodles, if noodles levitate in weird, precise spirals and are made out of glowing blue jello. The middle of it is more confusing: it's blue, it's about the size of a regular human, and there are more of the jello noodles, but looking into it feels like looking into one of those fun house infinity mirrors— somehow, the dense tangle of glowing goo pasta stretches dizzyingly _in_ , way farther than there is space in the room (his bedroom, he realizes— he's still in the Bunker).

Some of the outer spaghetti is still hovering in little curlicues, but a lot of it has drawn back into the main noodle-blob. It looks startled. Startled pasta. "You should not be awake yet," it says. Dean realizes that the ringing in his ears isn't from an injury— it's a constant, pitchy hum coming from the thing.

"Jesus Christ what _are_ you," Dean blurts out, "an' th' fuck're you doin' in my room?" Dreaming of Cas the crazy space storm is one thing— that's a fuckin dream. Probably a dream. Whatever. The point is, _this_ is not a dream. This is Real Life and right now Real Life involves a glowing funhouse infinity mirror of neon blue jelly spaghetti and Dean is _not okay_ with this kind of Real Life.

He scrabbles lamely when the thing reaches out with two huge pasta-tentacles, then tries thumping at them with his good arm when they curl warm and soft under him, but he may as well be punching water. He ends up clinging to them when they lift him like he weighs nothing. "The hell're y—" He can barely talk through the pain screaming through his ribs and leg. "Pu'me down !"

"As you wish," the thing says, and gently sets Dean back on the bed.

Dean pants for breath and stares up at the thing.

The thing stands there, humming and swirling placidly.

"Uh," Dean says, lost. This is not how anything involving tentacles or tentacle-adjacent appendages is supposed to go. Not that he's arguing, but seriously, this 'polite tentacles' thing on top of the pain and the demon in his garage and the everyone being missing and the everything else? He's got no idea what's going on. None.

Dean's eloquent noise seems to be the cue the thing was waiting for. "You will stay?"

Dean doesn't even answer; just slumps back on the bed enough that he can watch the thing without re-crushing his ribs.

Satisfied, the core of the pasta thing performs some kind of weird internal revolution, then sort of _scoots_ across the room for Dean's desk. The whole surface of the desk is taken up with bundles of herbs, a super sized mortar and pestle, and jars full of God only knows what; after a moment, the pasta-thing sort of… _extrudes_ human arms and hands (?) and proceeds to very quickly, very efficiently produce some sort of salve using the materials available. When it finishes, the hands grasp the mortar, vanish with it into the glowy tangle of jello-pasta, and the same twisting-scooting movement happens again. "You have exacerbated your injuries. You are fortunate Abaddon is sadistic, or you would have died much earlier. Please do not complete the task for it."

Dean grimaces. "Fuck off," he tries to growl. It comes out as more of a breathy whimper; sitting up is so not an option. "Where's my brother?" He remembers most of the fight— Hannah holding the doors, Abaddon wrecking his shit— but he only remembers seeing mega-Sammy for a moment before passing out. "Where's Kevin? What happened? Was… was I asleep?"

Parts of the thing flicker and swirl sort of… regretfully? He's not sure how jello glow pasta does regret, but there it is. "You have been unconscious for some time. Three days, I believe." It ripples some of its tendrils in something that looks oddly like a shrug. "After you passed out, Metatron fled and Abaddon engaged Samuel and Gadreel. Your leg was collateral in this combat. Samuel and Gadreel were able to severely damage the Knight and prevent it from breaching the rest of the bunker, but it escaped before the killing blow could be delivered." As the pasta-thing speaks, the mortar makes another appearance, along with the very human hands and arms that Dean had seen earlier. Two fingertips dip into the mortar and come up smeared with some sort of paste. "Remain still, please."

"Not much choice," Dean grunts. He twitches a little when the salved fingers make contact with his chest. "So… I've been dreaming?"

Some of the pasta curls and flicks. "Yes."

"No one else here?"

"Gadreel and Samuel have departed."

"No… like, weird spikes in energy, or blue things, or, like, space stuff, or-"

The mortar is set aside so the thing can rest a warm and firm finger over his lips. "You have been dreaming. That is all. There have been no changes or phenomena of note. Your brother is safe. The prophet is safe. Now, as I have requested previously, be silent and let me work . Precision is paramount for this to function."

Thoroughly scolded, Dean settles back on the bed while the pasta-thing draws.

"So… what's with the whole… the hands thing?"

The thing's glow ripples briefly. Dean gets the impression that it's confused. "I don't understand," it says.

Dean waits until it goes back for more paste to gesture with his good arm at all of the… well, the it. "Y'got all these… googly jelly tentacles— OW, _geez_ — floating around, but you're usin'— fucking _ow_ , watch the _ribs,_ Jesus — usin' human hands to move shit? Doesn't make sense."

The hand, halfway to Dean's chest to continue its drawing, stops; the thing's core, on the other hand, goes kind of wild, and the hum it makes gets uncomfortably loud and shrill. Panic, Dean thinks— that looks like panic. "What do you see right now, Dean Winchester?"

There's literally no better way to put it. "Walking shitload of glowing blue jello pasta?"

A long, increasingly awkward lack of talking ensues as the thing's whine holds steady at 'I want to tear my ears off'. Eventually, though, the thing seems to finish processing, the noise recedes a little bit, and the human hand returns and finishes drawing on Dean's chest with the salve.

The pasted-on sigil flashes; Dean sighs in relief when the pain from his ribs and arm goes down to a dull ache. "Th… thhhanks," he slurs, feeling very, very relaxed.

"It is the least I can do." The thing stands there for a moment, still unsettled, and then gives a surprisingly human sigh. One of its tentacles slides through the air toward him. "Sleep. We will speak again."

Dean feels a brief press, and then he's out like a light.

* * *

 _It doesn't take long before the darkness behind Dean's eyelids is broken by a glint of blue, and then by a flowing skein of stars. "Cas? Tha' you, man?"_

 **Hello, Dean,** _the universe says for Cas. The starry limb twists, then forks; suddenly, Cas-the-space-lightning-thing is spilling into view like he's being poured from a bottle._

 _Or maybe it's more like that octopus squeezing itself_ into _a bottle he saw on YouTube once. Something about the way Cas is moving smacks of… well, squishing._

 _Squishy angels. Dean laughs at the thought. "Yer one… squishy son'vabitch, Cas," he giggles._

 _Several branches of starlight lightning tip to the side in unison._ **You are intoxicated, Dean.**

 _Dean considers that for a moment. "It was the blue jello," he supplies after a moment of thought. "Not jello shots. Big jello spaguh… spa-geh… pasta thing. Drew somethin' on m' chest cause I busted my ribs. And m' shoulder. And m' leg." He looks up at Cas pleadingly. "It had_ hands _, Cas. Why'd the jello pasta have hands?"_

 _A swirl of stars unfolds and settles over Dean, warm and soft like a blanket._ **Human hands are delicate, and the shattered ones are not. Ey would have destroyed eir tools had ey used a gyre.**

 _Dean shamelessly tugs his dream Cas blanket until he's all wrapped up in starry, spacey, sciencey warmth. "Yer… delicate." He laughs, because he's hilarious. Cas doesn't. Dean starts to feel a little bad. Cas isn't delicate, even if he's all pretty and shit with the stars and the lightning and stuff. He's pretty and he's badass. Which probably makes him pretty badass, too. "And yer pretty, and badass, and warm and an octuh… an ock… squishy, Cas, yer awesome. I keep dreamin' 'bout you." Maybe that'll make up for it. Dean hopes he hasn't hurt dream-Cas' feelings, because dream-Cas is basically Cas, right, and Cas makes him feel… well, whatever feeling it is that makes people want mushy chick flick shit with other people._

 _He wants to bring Cas back and watch all the best movies with him, which isn't really all that mushy, but that's not all of it. He wants to make pie for Cas and watch him try it for the first time, and he wants to bring Cas to that one bee farm he passed in Iowa. He wants to drive to Glacier and Yellowstone and all those parks they've gone through, but this time so they can sit under the stars and go hiking just to hike and Cas can tell him about space and trees and mountains and animals and all that nature-y shit he likes. He wants to take Cas to a concert somewhere. Maybe a lot of concerts, so Cas can figure out what he likes, and so Dean'll know which tickets to get when they're in bigger cities._

 _He wants to see those stupid blue eyes again, just once, and the messy hair, and the dumb tie. He wants to hear Cas' ridiculous gravelly voice. Wonders what it's like in the morning, when he's just woke up._

 _He wants to apologize, because covering up the Gadreel thing and kicking Cas out without some better plan was the worst mistake he ever made._

 _He wants to tell Cas the truth, even if it is just dream-Cas._

 _Maybe especially because it's dream-Cas._

 _Dreams are probably the only chances he'll ever have._

 _"I love you," he slurs, eyes drooping. The warmth is making him sleepy. "Have fr ages, an' I shoulda told you, but I didn' get it at first and then I was scared an' even if I wasn' I wouldn'a said it 'cuz the people I say it to die, an I was gonna come find you, Cas, I was gonna bring you home 'cuz I messed up, but now yer… yer not here, an' this's a dream, so what've I got t'lose, n'... I love you, Cas."_

 _Cas doesn't reply, but Dean finds himself cradled even closer, like something precious._

 _He falls asleep wrapped in the night sky._


End file.
